Stb-tester news, product announcements & testing topics.
29 Feb 2024.
Today we have released Stb-tester’s new “Smart Navigation” functions
stbt.navigate_1d and stbt.navigate_grid. These functions will
autonomously navigate your application’s UI, learning the structure of your
menus to speed up future invocations. These are the first of many Machine
Learning / AI features on Stb-tester’s roadmap; we think you’ll agree that these
new APIs will greatly simplify and speed up your test development.
Read more...
11 Nov 2022.
In image processing, “segmentation” means finding which pixels belong to
foreground objects (such as text or other GUI elements) versus background
pixels. Stb-tester v33 adds a new API called segment (pronounced like the
verb: segMENT) that finds the location of distinct foreground elements.
Read more...
10 Nov 2022.
Stb-tester v33 introduces a new, easier, way of defining masks for
image-processing APIs such as is_screen_black, press_and_wait, and
wait_for_motion.
Read more...
09 Nov 2022.
find_regions_by_color is a new API that finds contiguous regions of a
particular color. It can be used to identify GUI elements such as the
“selection” or “focus” on menus and carousels.
Read more...
14 Feb 2022.
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.
Our VSCode IDE integration makes test-script development convenient. With it you get:
Read more...
11 Feb 2021.
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.
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.
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.
23 Jan 2020.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
10 Apr 2018.
When you are developing new test scripts (or modifying existing ones) we
recommend this workflow:
Read more...
20 Mar 2018.
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...
29 Feb 2016.
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...
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