Howto: turn on logging in Project White

Note: After moving my code, this wasn’t enough anymore, I did some additional changes.

Of course I ran into an issue: on one MDI child window I couldn’t find any components but on another it worked fine. I gave myself the task to try the built in logging funtion.

This is how you set it up when you are running Visual Studios testrunner.

To begin with, find you’ll find the file log4net.config in the installation folder for White.

Copy it to the root folder of your test project (where all the code to your tests are).

In Visual Studio, select your project, right click and choose “Add”->”Existing Item”. Make sure “All files” is selected. Choose log4net.config from the list.

Now,  click on the file in Visual Studio and look at it’s properties.
You should set them so that it says “Build Action: content” and “Copy to output directory: copy always”.

After that, add window.LogStructure() in the test where you want to do the logging. Of course, replace “window” with the name of your window.

Build the project, run the test and a log file should have been created.

Testing a new system

This is a classic problem: coming in as a new tester on a system that you are unfamiliar with.
I enjoy it. Clicking around, exploring the features, trying to figure out how they are supposed to be used. Sometimes I’m amazed of how clever an implementation is and sometimes frighten by the poor usability.

But the hard part is not knowing which things are bugs and which are features. I’m constantely popping in in the developer room (why am I not seated with them?) asking “Hey, is this a bug or a feature?”. But my philosophy is that if I encounter something that might be a bit fishy, I better report it than let it be.

However, I’m concerned that reporting all of these things will make me seem annoying to the developers. Maybe they see me as complaining about their design and their work. I do my best to report possible bugs without putting any judgement in them. I hope that helps.

How to get started with White

Once again I find myself faced with the giant that is Visual Studio. I’ve used it before, but in short burst. Long enough to get me familiar with it and then summer was over/baby was born/or similar and I’ve gone back to the Open Source world of the university.  Each time it takes me a while to get back on track.

At this job, I’ve been asked to use White for some ui testing. White is a tool that allows you to search and refence ui components by code instead of recording a sequence of clicks. It’s designed for Windows applications and is open source.

As I felt like a noob, I hoped for a newbie guide which I didn’t find. So here is mine.

Download and unzip White. Place does not matter.

Open Visual Studio, create a new project with some sort of form you would like to test. Add a Test Project to that solution. In the project tree for the Test Project, right click References and select “Add reference”.  There you can add references to the White dlls, the ones you need are “White.Core”, “White.NUnit” and “nunit.framework”.

That should be enought to get you started and follow Ben Halls guide. Remember if you find yourself with words underlined in red and the mouse over complaint about reference missing, right hand click and select “Resolve” the correct reference will be added to the “using” list.

There, this might help some other summer job tester out there.