And now for something completely different. The AutoIt script below will make you run Google’s hurdles doodle faster than Usain Bolt: 4.9 seconds is our automation record. Can you improve it? Surely there is room for more records before the London 2012 Olympics end.
We deal with AutoIt on a daily basis since we use it to test Internet Explorer layers in the Symantec Endpoint Virtualization suite. The script was written by Matias Palomera, one of our junior testing guys who also likes to automate Facebook games. It is amazing how motivational the first programming language you learnt can be, even if that language is AutoIt.
The script provided is very simple and blind: it only sends keyboard events based on manual adjustments (time delays, coordinates, and Google Chrome path) without retrieving infrormation from the browser. Our script would have to get the information from the browser to adjust the speed of the runner more precisely. We used AutoIt’s APIs to send information to IE. It does not provide APIs for WPF, Silverlight, and legacy VB6 controls such as TreeView, FlexGrid, DataGrid, and ListView. Our Deviare hooking technology would be a good choice when dealing with these user interface controls.
AutoIt Script
The code is available at github.