Stb-tester news, product announcements & testing topics.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Our VSCode IDE integration makes test-script development convenient. With it you get: Read more...
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...
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...
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.
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...
The optional else clause after a for loop is an obscure Python feature that
is surprisingly useful when writing automated GUI tests.
Read more...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
When you are developing new test scripts (or modifying existing ones) we recommend this workflow: Read more...
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...
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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