If you have your own audio software company (or are almost there) or work in a small team, you spend quite some time on non coding issues as well. How about meeting before or after the ADC17 for dinner to discuss some issues and share experiences?
Examples:
How do you show potential customers that you do great customer support?
Have you figured out a way to reduce annoying manual testing of your plugins in a multitude of DAWs? Have you maybe been able to automate some usage tests within popular DAWs?
Have you ever been sued by someone, with the pure intention of financially harming you? Strategies to protect your company from such harm in advance?
Things like these. Anyone interested?
(I know about the panel by Heather D. Rafter about law issues at this years ADC)
Automating that process would be frikking fantastic. Appium is something I’ve always wanted to use for that very reason. Perhaps it’s something Roli should consider looking at some day?
It’s a fully fledged test automation framework that targets mobile, but can be configured for desktop purposes.
Appium looks interesting, thanks. I only quickly looked at its website but I doubt that it will be possible to automate interaction with a plugin within a host. And it won’t work on macOS, where most of my users are.
You could also use the scripting APIs provided by Ableton Live or Reaper. But again I doubt that it will be possible to simulate mouse clicks on the plugins GUI and keyboard input - the way a user would interact with a plugin.
http://pyautogui.readthedocs.io could be interesting for GUI automation.
But GUI automation is quite fragile. It will fail if the GUI of the DAW or of your plugin changes. Heck, even if your plugin window will be displayed at another position then before it will fail. So I doubt this saves time compared to manual usage tests.
I would love to hear if someone is doing GUI automation for testing successfully. Maybe at dinner in London around ADC?
