Haystack – graphical editor for openQA needles

Haystack is a graphical application for creating and editing openQA needles. It provides a dedicated desktop environment for maintaining the reference screenshots used by openQA to test graphical operating system interfaces.

openQA is an automated testing framework that checks whether a system behaves as expected by comparing screenshots captured during tests against predefined reference images. These references, known as needles, identify the portions of an image that are important for determining whether a particular screen or interface element is present.

Each needle consists of a screenshot and associated metadata describing the areas relevant to the test. Haystack simplifies the process of working with these references by providing a visual editing environment rather than requiring users to manipulate image coordinates and metadata manually.

The application is particularly useful when maintaining automated graphical tests for Linux distributions, desktop environments and applications whose interfaces change over time.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Graphical editing of openQA needle reference screenshots.
• Open local needle repositories and select individual needles for editing.
• Draw and modify regions of screenshots used for visual matching.
• Replace a needle’s reference screenshot with an image from a local file.
• Paste replacement screenshots directly from the clipboard.
• Allows screenshots captured from failed openQA tests to be used as replacement reference images.
• GNOME desktop interface using GTK and libadwaita.

Website: gitlab.gnome.org/jwharm/Haystack
Support:
Developer: Jan-Willem Harmannij
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Haystack is written in Vala. Learn Vala with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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