Review of Froglogic Squish

What is it?

Squish, by a company called Froglogic, is a rather impressive GUI testing tool.

It claims support for “all major GUI technologies” on “all desktop, mobile, web and embedded platforms”

We evaluated it for use in a Linux C++ Qt 5.5 project, so I can’t comment on “all GUI technologies” and “all platforms”, but rather just this specific case.

Our goal was to find a tool to perform automated acceptance tests for our product, and so we tried Squish for this purpose.

They still don’t get it (PlatformIO edition)

Caution: Rant ahead.

Woah, look at this thing!

I’m currently toying with an embedded framework called PlatformIO.

It’s everything you expect from a cool modern framework. It has a cute logo, a nice Bootstrap web design, the whole nine yards.

Installing it is seamless and quick. It boasts a nice interface to install drivers for a number of popular embedded boards. It wants to be your one-stop framework for embedded development.

Installing SikuliX and Cucumber to test-drive your GUI, BDD-style

I’ve been impressed with the Sikuli (now SikuliX) project for a few years yet.

It has a few warts, but I like the concept of interacting with a GUI just like a user, using visual inspection. If an UI aspect of your software can’t be properly identified visually, it can’t be used in SikuliX – and in reality, neither can it be used by a human.

I’m also a fan of BDD-Style specifications – even more so if they can be made executable, e.g. through cucumber.

the V-Model and mini-Vs (and Agile)

It’s dead! You will hear people say. It’s an abomination, they cry. It should be banished to the past, they demand.

Now… what’s so terrible? Maybe you’ve heard of it before: the V-Model (interestingly, Wikipedia has two entries for it). It’s widely known and used in software-related product development.

So what is the V-Model?

It’s a model on how to systematically approach software (or embedded devices) development.

The idea is that one starts out at the top-left of an imagined V with the highest-level requirements, usually direct demands of the customer. These are then progressively broken down into more detailed specifications, architectures etc.

BDD und Rhythmus

Das erstaunliche an Rhythmus ist, daß man ihn nicht wirklich wahrnimmt. Aber wenn er mal fehlt, merkt man urplötzlich, daß irgendetwas nicht stimmt. Aber was nur?

Aber wir machen doch Software, nicht Musik?

Alle kreativen Unternehmungen haben Rhythmus. Das fiel mir kürzlich wieder auf, während ich verschiedene C++ Behaviour-driven Development (BDD) Frameworks miteinander verglich. Einige Code-Beispiele gefielen mir auf Anhieb, während ich andere irgendwie blöd fand, obwohl sie technisch völlig in Ordnung waren. Was war los?

On rhythm in BDD

The remarkable thing about rhythm is that you tend not to notice it. But once it’s absent, suddenly something feels off, and you struggle to figure out what it is.

Hang on – we’re making software, not music!

Alle creative endeavours have rhythm. This occurred to me the other day when I was comparing C++ Behaviour-driven Development (BDD) frameworks. I was looking at various examples, and I noticed some immediately appealed to me, while others felt kind of meh, even though they were technically fine. What was going on?