The secret was to give up on the idea of using the Python test script fragments created in the SikuliX IDE directly. Rather, I now translate these scripts line by line into Java; e.g. from
wait("xyz.png")
to
screen.wait("xyz.png");
Each short Python script is converted to a simple method on an object representing the application or individual screen under test. These methods can then be invoked as fixtures from any test framework, e.g. jUnit or Fit. The resulting test suite is built with Gradle and can be run as a standalone application to test the target application end-to-end.
One of the tricky bits was to set the image search path correctly so that the images embedded in the jar file can be located by the SikuliX API, whether you're running in the IDE or standalone. By storing a dummy SikuliX script within the src/main/resources folder (e.g. images.sikuli) you can use the SikuliX IDE directly to capture and fine-tune images for use in your tests.
Depending on the CI environment of the project, another tricky part may be to provide both the application under test and the test suite with a graphical pseudo display on which to run, but there is quite a lot of advice in the SikuliX documentation as well as on Stack Overflow about that.
Next steps:
- Test this approach under Windows and Linux too
- Enable the use of FIT in place of jUnit (more appropriate for whole-system tests)
- Make use of the optional Tesseract library to read back values from the screen
- Build and run test suite in various CI environments
