User Interface Quality Improvement With Automated Testing SubApps and Error Markers in 4diac IDE

Open source projects often only have a few contributors. They try to incorporate all new ideas and improvements. However, this leaves little time for testing, which means that the quality of the software suffers. Unfortunately, this also applies to Eclipse 4diac. Last year, the foundation for automated testing 4diac IDE was laid with Eclipse SWTBot. However, these tests only cover the most important basic functions such as creating a new project, drag&drop of Function Blocks (FBs) and creating connections between them. The extended functions are still tested manually, such as the SubApps, error markers or loading and testing larger test projects. It has also become apparent that the automated tests need to be more stable, as the 4diac IDE is constantly being extended and improved and some tests that ran last year are no longer running due to these changes. Therefore, these tests need to be more stable and also easily adaptable. An important step in this regard will be that the tests will no longer rely on hard-coded coordinates, but will be able to search for elements by ID. The ability to access the property sheet of 4diac IDE also promises improvements, as it will be important for advanced testing. Nearly every 4diac element has one or more property sheets.