Qt “monkey” Testing - simulate random clicks and keypresses

Question

Is there a framework to simulate a deterministically pseudorandom series of clicks imposed upon a Qt application - in order to try to trigger any memory leaks, threading errors etc - typical monkey-testing?

Some exotic, monkey use for QTestLib?

Answer 1

Yes, you can use the useful unit test module. Look in particular at the class QTestEventList. Just provide the QWidget you want to test, or the QMainWindow or whatever subclass you want and add the list of events you want to generate. If you want to generate a sequence of points so that you can reproduce in case of failure, use qsrand() and qrand().

Answer 2

The Squish automated GUI testing framework can be used to do monkey clicking in your application. There are a couple of nice things about using Squish for this purpose:

• Squish runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android
• It logs whatever random steps it happens to perform as a script that can be re-run (monkey testing docs)
• It has an option to take a screenshot on application crash (screenshot on failure settings docs)

Disadvantages: Squish is not free. Setting up Squish to run your application can be super-irritating, especially if your application requires specific build characteristics of Qt or Python.