Stb-tester Blog

Stb-tester news, product announcements & testing topics.

Tags: Test Development × All Tags

14 Feb 2022.

Lint checks in pull requests

When you push a git commit, Stb-tester uses any idle Node in your test-farm to run a “lint” check using Pylint to catch common mistakes in your code before you even run a test. Read more...

24 Aug 2021.

New instructions for VSCode setup on Windows

Our VSCode IDE integration makes test-script development convenient. With it you get: Read more...

11 Feb 2021.

How to structure your test scripts for maximum re-use across multiple platforms

If you want to test the same app on several different platforms, you want to re-use as much test-script code as possible. For example you might have your app on Android TV, Apple TV, Fire TV, PlayStation, Roku, XBox, and possibly even some operator-specific set-top box platforms. This article shows how to use the same test scripts and the same Page Objects for all these platforms, and how to manage the cases where your app has differences in appearance or behaviour across platforms. Read more...

02 Oct 2020.

Testing on-screen keyboards with Stb-tester

Stb-tester v32 added new APIs that make it much easier to navigate on-screen keyboards from your test scripts. In this tutorial we’ll model the behaviour of YouTube’s search keyboard on the Apple TV, and we’ll write a Page Object (a Python class) to navigate the keyboard from our test scripts. Read more...

28 Jan 2020.

Visual Studio Code integration with the Stb-tester Portal

Stb-tester provides deep integration with Visual Studio Code, the world’s most popular IDE.¹ 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...

05 Dec 2019.

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...

02 Dec 2019.

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...

14 Oct 2019.

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...

20 Sep 2019.

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...

26 Feb 2019.

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...

22 Oct 2018.

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...

11 Oct 2018.