Our approach: Handcrafted for Eclipse

There are many good tools exists on the market, which can be interested to Eclipse developer to implement functional and UI testing. However most (in not all) of that tools offer wide support of technologies besides SWT (which is in particular interest of Eclipse developer) like Swing, Web application testing, etc. Drawback of such “growing wide” approach is that tool vendors do not pay enough attention to Eclipse specifics.

Obviously, supporting SWT is not enough for functional testing of Eclipse-based products — SWT is just a small part of Eclipse Technology stack. Some UI testing tools are trying to provide some support of GEF technology as well, but this also seems to be to low bar to cover functionality of complex product. Developers and testers want to have implicit support of the whole stack, starting from Platform, IDE, GMF, etc.

After years of attempt to implement seamless functional testing process within our company, and trying to help our customers to implement functional testing on our side, we was not able to find the right tool that would ideally fit our Eclipse development needs. So the idea to develop a tool has born, and Q7 project started with “growing deep” and handcrafted for eclipse approach in mind.