LDTP and UI Test Tools for GNU/Linux

There currently aren't many commercial UI test tools for GNU/Linux applications.  GNU/Linux has come a long way towards becoming more popular on the desktop, but it is still somewhat niche in the business world.   There is a large contingent of Windows software testers and QA engineers that make their living using commercial UI test tools (WinRunner, QTP, SilkTest, Robot, etc) from the big tool vendors (HP/Mercury, IBM/Rational, Borland/Segue, Compuware, etc).  I am not talking about small test utilities; I am talking about large UI layer test suites that people build extensive customized test frameworks on top of.  These are used most often in large business applications for automating functional and regression tests.

Good test tooling is a prerequisite for any large deployment of a business application.  As GNU/Linux becomes more popular on the desktop, I think this will become a more important factor and tool vendors will begin to beef up their GNU/Linux UI test tool offerings.  It would be great if there were viable open source tools as an alternative.  On Windows, this never happened.  There are currently no high quality open source UI test tools available.


I just took a look at the GNU/Linux Desktop Testing Project (GNU/LDTP):

"GNU/Linux Desktop Testing Project (GNU/LDTP) is aimed at producing high quality test automation framework and cutting-edge tools that can be used to test GNU/Linux Desktop and improve it."

wow.. I had never heard of that until now.

The description looks good.. it is a UI layer test tool that works in both GNOME and KDE environments.

.. and it is Free/Open Source.

.. and it is written in Python (which completely rules)

I will be keeping an eye on this and any other open source test tools in that space.