Welcome to the FEST Swing Module

FEST-Swing is a Java library that provides a fluent interface for functional Swing GUI testing. This library provides an easy-to-use API that makes creation and maintenance of GUI tests easy.

October 16th 2008: FEST-Swing 1.0b2 released! For more information, please read the release notes.

Why do we need to test GUIs?

Testing GUIs can make the entire system safer and more robust. Any GUI, even one providing only the simplest capabilities, likely encloses some level of complexity. Any complexity in software must be tested because code without tests is a potential source of bugs. A well-tested application has a greater chance of success.

GUI testing is also essential during application maintenance. During this phase, code might be refactored frequently to improve design, and this code often encloses great portions of the user interface. Having a solid test suite that includes GUI code can give us confidence that we are not inadvertently introducing bugs.

Reference: Test-Driven GUI Development with TestNG and Abbot by Alex Ruiz and Yvonne Wang Price (IEEE Software May/June 2007 issue)

Feature Overview

1. Simulation of user interaction with a GUI (e.g. mouse and keyboard input)
2. Reliable GUI component lookup (by type, by name or custom search criteria)
3. Support for all Swing components included in the JDK
4. Compact and powerful API for creation and maintenance of functional GUI tests
5. Supports Applet testing
6. Ability to embed screenshots of failed GUI tests in HTML test reports
7. Can be used with either TestNG or JUnit
8. Experimental Groovy Builder support (coming soon!)

FEST-Swing requires Java SE 5.0 or later.

It can be downloaded here. For Maven 2 users, the project's repository can be found at http://fest.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/fest/m2/repository/ (groupId: fest, artifactId: fest-swing).

Examples

The following example shows a test verifying that an error message is displayed if the user forgets to enter her password when trying to log in an application:

  dialog.comboBox("domain").select("Users");
  dialog.textBox("username").enterText("leia.organa");
  dialog.button("login").click();
  dialog.optionPane().requireErrorMessage()
                     .requireMessage("Please enter your password");