Cross-machine UI automation frameworks?

Question

Good time of day,

Tried to google it but haven't found an answer - are there any free or paid UI automation frameworks that can give me ability to automate an applications that installed on different computers but communicate with each other?

Ideally what I want is:

1. Do something on Machine A
2. Wait for event on Machine B
3. Do something on Machine B after event occured
4. Wait for event on A

I'm a bit lazy to write and run different tests on both machines (e.g. test1 with steps 1 and 4 and test2 with steps 2 and 3 so I'm looking for other solution.

Answer 1

Perhaps you could set something like this up using Jenkins: http://jenkins-ci.org/

One idea for how it might be done:

• The Jenkins master node launches a job on Machine A
• The program running on Machine A contacts the master node (via the Jenkins REST API) to launch a job on Machine B
• Machine A then starts polling the master node, waiting for Machine B's job to go into a completed state
• Machine A continues with its work once the Machine B job is complete

Note that you might be able to dispense with the need for a third machine on which to run the Jenkins server software, and instead make your A or B machine serve a double role as the Jenkins master node as well as a job runner.

This approach means you'd end up with code specific to the Jenkins API code in the processes you're launching on A and B, but nonetheless it might be fairly quick to implement.