Sikuli : What is Sikuli?

Now a days automated testing is becoming popular as it is decreasing time for manual testing and also reduce the time for regular testing and repetitive testing. Among them UI automation testing is important as it is playing the real user activity over the UI. There are lots of UI testing tools in the market both open source and commercial. All of them have some pros and corns. Most of them follow the basic rule by detecting the UI components using UI’s internal structure. But some of the cases UI internal structures are so complex and dynamic that our tools cannot detect it  properly and even at run times it can detect the element and sometimes not. We can overcome this problem by using a tool that can detect a component by using its image not its internal structure. Sikuli is such a tool.

Sikuli can automate anything on the screen by using  image recognition algorithm to identify the elements and do operation on the element.

Things to know about Sikuli

• It uses image recognition to identify and control components.
• It is useful where UI’s internal or source code cannot be accessed easily.
• It is an open source Research project by User Interface Design Group at MIT.
• Sikuli is now maintained and further developed by Raimund Hocke together with open source community as the name SikuliX.
• Sikuli has its own IDE and it supports Python scripting language
• It has its own built in image capturing tool but it also support image captured by other third party tools
• Any types of application such as web, desktop or mobile platforms can be automated and tested through Sikuli

That’s all for now to start Sikuli.

In my next post I will show how to install and run Sikuli, write automated test script using Sikuli IDE and so on.

Till then …Happy Automated testing using the power of image detection!!!