Roman Joost romanofski

Automated acceptance tests for terminal applications

Acceptance testing is a method of testing an application from a users point of view. In this talk, I will demonstrate our approach to full automated testing a terminal email application (purebred) with the tasty-tmux framework. I'll elaborate the benefits and trade-offs, what problems we experienced and how we solved them.

Automating acceptance testing is challenging, because the tests can not adapt to timing sensitive changes in the

References

Real World Haskell: A TUI e-mail client

There is a myriad of free software e-mail clients to choose from. However only few support a text user interface and fast indexing.

Talk Outline:

Quick introduction to brick and how to build text user interfaces
How do we extensively test purebred
What have we done to leverage Haskell to build a better client than what is available today
What have we learned so far

Application Development from the Users Perspective

Short description

The talk gives first hand experience on creating personas - a usability tool for designing user interfaces - and how to incorporate them in the design process.

Long description

Personas are hypothetical users which you can use when designing features for your application, to anticipate user interaction based on their goals. One of many problems in software engineering is providing consistent and easy to use user interfaces. How do you know what UI enables your users to get things done? How do you find a solution if you have conflicting interests? How do you build an interface, which doesn't leave decisions about configuration of the UI up to the user.

This talk will offer a solution to these questions by making use of personas. It will give first hand experience from developing personas for Beaker: from user interviews to how we incorporate them in our design process.

	{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
	import qualified Data.Text as T
	import Control.Lens
	import Data.Functor.Compose

	newtype Mailbody = Mailbody [Paragraph]
	deriving (Show)

	data Line = Line Int T.Text
	deriving (Show)

	mkEntity = EntityCommand
	(const . pure)
	(tmpfileResource (view mhKeepTemp cmd))
	(\_ fp -> toProcessConfigWithTempfile (view mhMakeProcess cmd) fp)
	mkConfig :: (MonadError Error m) => m (EntityCommand a FilePath)
	mkConfig =
	case maybeEntity of
	Nothing -> throwError (GenericError "No attachment selected")
	Just e -> either throwError (pure . mkEntity) $ entityToBytes e

	#!/bin/sh
	sleep 1
	set -e
	cat $1

	% result/bin/termonad
	Configuration '/home/rjoost/.config/termonad/termonad.hs' changed. Recompiling.
	Error occurred while loading configuration file.


	/home/rjoost/.config/termonad/termonad.hs:7:1: error:
	Could not find module ‘Termonad’
	Use -v to see a list of the files searched for.
	\|
	7 \| import Termonad

	Sat Oct 1 09:37 2016 Time and Allocation Profiling Report (Final)

	benchmark-csv-import +RTS -p -RTS

	total time = 483.97 secs (483969 ticks @ 1000 us, 1 processor)
	total alloc = 36,758,849,576 bytes (excludes profiling overheads)

	COST CENTRE MODULE %time %alloc

	stepError Database.Sqlite 92.6 0.0