Besides component recognition, timing is an inherently difficult
problem in automatic testing. No two runs of a Java program are
identical when it comes to timing. Too much depends on things like
system load or memory usage. This can lead to a situation where a
target component for an event is not available, because the VM is
still busy popping up the dialog window that contains it.
To avoid needless failures of tests, QF-Test combines several
tactics:
-
Events are synchronized with the AWT event queue, meaning that
after each event sent to the SUT, QF-Test waits until the events
generated as side effects have been processed, before it sends
another event.
-
In some cases, especially with asynchronous updates, this doesn't
suffice, so whenever a component is not available, QF-Test waits
for a certain amount of time to give it a chance to appear. This
delay can be customized through the option Wait for non-existent component (ms).
-
An additional timeout defined by the option Wait for non-existent item (ms) applies when looking for sub-items of a
component, e.g. a tree node.
-
These default timeouts should be kept rather short, a few seconds
at most, so in addition you can set individual timeouts and delays
wherever applicable.
