Tools we’ve been working with: Sikuli

With a wide range of tools and resources at our disposal, and with experience in working with many others, we thought we should give you a heads-up about the latest and greatest tools that are out there and available for testing.

One such tool we’ve liked working with is Sikul (see their website: https://www.sikuli.org/).

This open source research project from the guys at MIT is very interesting – Sikuli automates anything you see on the screen. It uses image recognition to identify and control GUI components, and proves especially useful when there is no easy access to a GUI’s internal or source code. Some even reckon this unique programming tool has the ability to see like a human being as it puts the GUI in the hands of programmers.

It works on your desktop, on different kinds of mobile, and uses pixel detection in order to automate things. For example, if you want to click an input field, just take a snap of it either with the sikuli snap editor or with any other tool, and the framework will automatically detect it using pixel detection and lets you interact with it.

Sikuli can be very useful for automating things that are not only on a web application but also in any other place, even Windows.

As an example, automating the upload file popup can’t be done with selenium, although there are workarounds for it. However, sikuli can automate the upload file popup without the need for sophisticated workarounds to do the dirty work.

Sikuli is great – have any of you tried it yet?