stb-tester.com
Visual Studio Code integration with the Stb-tester Portal
Stb-tester provides deep integration with Visual Studio Code, the world’s most popular IDE. You can now execute tests remotely (on your Stb-tester Node hardware) right from your IDE. This can greatly speed up your test-development cycle.
- According to Stack Overflow’s 2019 [developer survey]. ↩
Static analysis for your test scripts: Catching common mistakes before you run the tests!
Pylint is a static analysis tool for Python code. This means that it analyses your code to catch common mistakes, without actually running your code. This saves a lot of development time by catching the mistakes immediately —your IDE shows red squiggles under each mistake— instead of running the test and waiting for it to reach the line of code where the mistake is. Read more...
Python's for...else: Surprisingly useful for implementing retry logic in test scripts
The optional else clause after a for loop is an obscure Python feature that
is surprisingly useful when writing automated GUI tests.
Read more...
IDE Configuration: Smart code completion & linting for Stb-tester APIs
The Stb-tester Python APIs are now available on PyPI (the Python Package Index) so that you can install them on your development PC — it doesn’t matter if you’re using Windows, MacOS, or Linux. Read more...
Testing on-screen keyboards, part 2: Navigating the keyboard
In part 1 we created a Page Object that knows how to identify the current selection of an on-screen keyboard, just from looking at the pixels on the screen. In this article we will teach our Page Object how to navigate the keyboard — that is, how to move the selection from its current position to a target letter. In this tutorial we are using the keyboard from the YouTube app on Apple TV. Read more...
Testing on-screen keyboards, part 1: Identifying the selection
Stb-tester v31 added new APIs that make it much easier to navigate on-screen keyboards from your test scripts. In this series of tutorials we will create a Page Object that knows how to navigate YouTube’s search keyboard on the Apple TV. Read more...
Using the Object Repository to debug your Page Objects
I have written a Page Object for the “Search” page in the YouTube app on Apple TV. My page object has a property that reads the search term using OCR, but the OCR is mis-reading some words. Let’s investigate! Read more...
Porting a test-pack to Python 3
Stb-tester v31 adds support for test-scripts written in Python 3 (Python 2 is still supported, too). To migrate an existing test-pack to Python 3, we recommend the following steps. Read more...
Using match transparency
Stb-tester v30 includes a new feature: Searching for a reference image that has some transparent pixels. This blog post describes three ways you can use this new feature that makes writing test-scripts much easier than before. Read more...
Testing Alexa integration
An end-to-end test for your Alexa integration is easy to automate with Stb-tester. In this short video we issue commands to Alexa by playing pre-recorded audio files (“Alexa, play Mr. Robot”). Then we validate that the command was successful by looking at the video output from the set-top box (in this video, a Fire TV Stick). Read more...
Stb-tester support for PyCharm
Stb-tester now provides PyCharm integration out of the box, allowing you to run tests against the real set-top-box, right from your IDE: Read more...
Test-script development workflow
When you are developing new test scripts (or modifying existing ones) we recommend this workflow: Read more...
Cropping reference images in your browser
When you are capturing reference images for your test scripts, the Stb-tester Portal now allows you to crop the images directly in your browser. Read more...
New videos & tutorials
We have just published three videos showcasing the stb-tester ONE, including a detailed guide for measuring channel change times on a set-top box: Read more...