CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
The JCOP Framework is a toolkit used widely at CERN for the development of industrial control systems in several domains (i.e. experiments, accelerators and technical infrastructure). The software development started 10 years ago and there is now a large base of production systems running it. For the success of the project, it was essential to formalize and automate the quality assurance process. The paper will present the overall testing strategy and will describe in detail mechanisms used for GUI testing. The choice of a commercial tool (Squish) and the architectural features making it appropriate for our multi-platform environment will be described. Practical difficulties encountered when using the tool in the CERN context are discussed as well as how these were addressed. In the light of initial experience, the test code itself has been recently reworked in OO style to facilitate future maintenance and extension. The paper concludes with a description of our initial steps towards incorporation of full-blown Continuous Integration (CI) support.
