I think that there are (at least) two different types of testing that are valuable for a project like QGIS and both play important roles. Different people use different names, but here's my version... 1) White box: This is very much in the hands of the developer and is aimed at proving the functionality of their code - stop the bug before it gets out of your own hands. This type of testing knows how the code should work and typically, among other things, explores the boundary conditions. 2) Black box: This has no special knowledge of how the internals works and tests as a dumb user... that can be relied on to provide the same test coverage every time. One obvious use of this is for regressions testing of the finished build, but I would suggest that with minor enhancements it could be used to help ease some of the user documentation tasks. QGIS supports multiple languages and operating systems, is released regularly but, consequently, it is hard to produce user manuals and tutorials with the most appropriate screen shots, etc. If a "black box" type of test harness were developed that could be "trained" (e.g. recording keystrokes and mouse commands with a way to edit them) plus the ability to capture images of screen objects (windows, dialogs, buttons, icons) and save them to named files, this would present further opportunities. The same test (script?) could be run on builds for different operating systems, languages and versions. A standard set of build specific images would be generated and, assuming standard file names and locations, could automatically be imported into the various user documents. There would still need to be some manual text editing, but the labour intensive screenshot processing would be removed. This must be a common requirement across projects, has anyone come across any tools that already exist? Andrew Chapman
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