Paul Hammant's Blog: Eyeball Unit

At XPDay last night, we talked of a new way to unit testing. Apparently it was in the collective unconscious though (Owen Rogers had thought of it as well). EyeballUnit takes snapshots of GUIs (hopefully under script control) and in a FIT like way displays those in web pages. One the first past thru a test script, a human would be needed to run thru the table of screenshots and click a "yes that is a pass" checkbox. The second pass thru, eyeball unit will see there are no pixel changes and pass tests itself. If there is one deviance, a human is called for again, to say yes/no for the new screen shot. The human may know that the new picture is good. Then again, with a side-by-side comparison of GIFs, they may know it is a failure and mark it as such. Basically, there is an amber state between red and green. Need someone to code it.

More context? Well in .Net is difficult to query the state of some fields. Toolbars for example. So though you can script the test, you can't programmatically test the result. Could be good for Java/others too, though there is MarathonMan at SourceForge