Free automated Testing tools for MFC based GUI App

Question

I am a complete newbie to Windows development and test platforms. I am working on a legacy MFC based GUI application and looking for tools that would help with automated testing of the UI. A whole bunch of tools came up when I searched but most of them don't seem to support MFC.

The options I considered were: a. Coded UI/ UI Automation - Seems like a good fit but not supported in Visual Studio Professional 2012 (which is my dev env). b. Google test - no MFC support ? (Pls share any pointers if you think otherwise) c. TestStack White - The open source tool built on top of Coded UI but doesn't seem to be actively supported anymore. Couldn't find any documentation on current version or if it is still actively supported. d. Develop my own TestInterface and modify the existing View/Window classes as described here: http://www.drdobbs.com/testing/dont-develop-gui-tests-teach-your-app-to/240168468 . Not in favor of such a major change at the moment and would like to try some tool which can at least automate the basic features.

Could you pls share your experience with any of these or other tools for testing MFC apps.

PS: I did see other posts like MFC gui testable with google test? but didn't get the answers I was looking for. It is the purely visual aspects of the tool that I am looking for automation and the functional logic is already well covered.

Thanks in advance! VeeAaaKay

Answer 1

We use pywinauto for MFC-based applications in our company. It's the best choice because the interface is very pythonic. It cannot deal with WPF, but MFC is really core case now. I'm monitoring pywinauto tag at the StackOverflow. Feel free to ask questions here or submit issues to GitHub repo. I'm one of pywinauto maintainers.

There is also GUI helper for pywinauto: SWAPY. It can view controls hierarchy and even simple code generator is available.