Project #5 in my series of new projects on the Indigo release train is Jubula. Achim Lorke, the project leader from Jubula kindly answered my four questions.
1. What does your project provide to an Eclipse user?
Jubula provides automated functional GUI testing for Java and HTML applications. It is aimed at teams who want their automated tests to be written by test experts from the user perspective, without requiring any coding effort. Jubula tests incorporate best practices from software development to ensure long-term maintainability of the automated tests.
Comprehensive documentation, cheat sheets and example projects are available to help one get started.
2. Why are you personally involved in the project?
Jubula emerged from the commercial GUIdancer test tool. I’ve been the project lead of GUIdancer for several years and have been involved with all design decisions from the beginning. Naturally there is a lot of personal interest in the continuing success of Jubula.
I’ve also been a fan of the Eclipse ecosystem for the last 5 years and sort of a champion of supporting Eclipse in our company. I convinced my partners to join the Eclipse foundation, first as a Solutions member and with the Jubula project as a Strategic Developer member. So you could say that I have the opportunity to work on my pet project and be part of a great OSS community.
3. What is the future roadmap for your project?
Jubula will graduate with the Indigo release in June. We will of course continue being part of the release train. On short term we will work on a better integration with the Eclipse IDE, i.e. supporting launch configurations and internal test environments. Mid-term we are looking into collaboration with the proposed Lyo project to add testing to the ALM tool chain. We hope very much that this will allow a better integration of different tools into a tool chain. As an ongoing task we will add more GUI toolkit to the supported components. We will also make it even more easy for other to contribute to this by fixing some APIs and providing more documentation and tooling.
4. What have been your experiences of participating in the Indigo release train?
Well, it was overwhelming. We joined the release train very late (in December) and had to work through a lot of issues very fast. There is a lot to read and a lot to understand, but this is not easily accessible. In hindsight we tried too much getting things done by ourself (i.e. not asking others). We actually got out of trouble after we started talking to others (a lot of thanks to Markus Knauer for helping us here). Everyone was very helpful and knowledgeable. We were fortunate enough to miss the problems caused by the exploding power supply during the RC3 builds. But even this problems showed how professionals working together can solve almost every problem.
This is the end of the series. There are six other new projects that have joined the release train, including Agent Modeling Platform, Eclipse Generation Factories, Gyrex, EMF Facet, Graphiti, and m2eclipse. Unfortunately, these projects did not get a chance to answer my questions, understandably they are busy shipping code! I’d highly recommend you check them out. It is great to see a wealth of new and innovative projects joining Indigo.
