Announcing dogtail: a GUI automation and test framework

[Zack Cerza <zcerza redhat com>]

Announcing Dogtail: a GUI automation and test framework

A crack team of QA and desktop specialists working at Red Hat is pleased
to announce the public release of "Dogtail".

Dogtail is a GUI test automation framework written in Python that uses
Accessibility (a11y) technologies to communicate with desktop
applications. Dogtail scripts are written in Python and executed like
any other Python program.

The Dogtail website is at:
http://people.redhat.com/zcerza/dogtail/index.html

Movies of Dogtail in action can be found at:
http://people.redhat.com/zcerza/dogtail/media.html

Dogtail has a number of features that aid in the automation and testing
of desktop applications. These include:
    * Scripts written in Python - Since Dogtail uses Python as its
scripting language, scriptwriters gain enormous power and flexibility in
what they can do with Dogtail. If you can do it in Python, you can do it
with Dogtail.
    * Procedural API - A procedural scripting API allows for fast and
easy blackbox tests to be written. Ace programmer credentials are not
necessary to write useful automated scripts.
    * Easily Extensible - Dogtail is object-oriented "under the covers"
so more advanced users can write custom classes and helper libraries simply.
    * Results and debug reporting - Test case comparisons are written to
a tab-delimited results file for easy processing. Debug information is
written to its own log for detailed analysis of what happened during
script execution.

Dogtail is Free Software, released under the GPL.

We are also releasing a set of Python bindings for AT-SPI under the
LGPL; these are used by Dogtail and can be found in GNOME CVS in the
"pyspi" module.

Our initial focus has been to get the project working with GNOME, but we
hope to support KDE when its acessibility support has solidified.