Maccium

Abstract

Selenium WebDriver is the de-facto industry standard for testing web applications, recently the project was extended to provide support for automated testing of mobile applications. This decision was taken based on the fact that users interact with applications on the various platform in the same way (i.e. clicking, typing, etc.), therefore it would be ideal if quality assurers could use the same tool to test all kinds of applications. This also holds true for desktop applications but the Selenium WebDriver project does not o↵er this functionality, therefore this project was started with the aim of investigating the possibility of adapting the Selenium WebDriver API so it can be used to automate OS X applications. To meet this aim a solution (called Maccium) was designed and developed with the objectives of it being compatible with the Selenium WebDriver protocol and is semantically similar to the browser implementations of WebDriver so quality assurers coming from a background of testing web applications will find it straightforward to start automating OS X applications. Research was carried out about the Selenium Web- Driver project, the technologies it uses and the various ways one can interact and automate OS X applications. Using this information a driver for OS X was designed, developed and in order to determine whether or not the objectives were met, evaluated. To determine the solution’s level of compliance with the Selenium WebDriver protocol a detailed analysis of the implementation was carried out resulting that the implementation is compliant to a satisfactory level. To evaluate Maccium for semantic similarity and ease of use a case study and a user study were carried out and the outcome of these studies indicated that this objective was also sufficiently met; conclusively both objectives and therefore the aim of this project were met to a satisfactory level.