Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 75. The Automation Framework

The automation framework enables you to test Flex applications by recording user gestures and their results in a test script, and then playing back the script to verify that the expected behavior actually occurred. This chapter explains the technology, and then provides a simple example and pointers towards further information on the topic.

Overview

It's easy to write software that's crawling with bugs, but there's really no excuse. Testing can be conducted and automated throughout development and delivery, so that programming mistakes and integration issues are identified early and resolved before they have serious consequences. There are many tools available to help and many testing techniques to follow. A successful software project is most likely when testing is carried out continuously, at various different levels, from the smallest logical unit inside an ActionScript class, to the integrated whole. Chapter 73, "Unit Testing and Test-Driven Development with FlexUnit," covered the lower level; this chapter covers higher-level testing with the Flex automation framework.

The automation framework consists of a number of Flex libraries that are included in full with Flex Builder Professional and provided in limited form with Flex Builder Standard. These libraries serve various needs: they allow developers to test the round-trip behavior of their applications using third-party tools, they facilitate the development of these third-party tools by providing ...