desktop-test-strategy-reference

Overview

Desktop GUI testing is fragmented along two axes: operating system (Windows / macOS / Linux) and UI toolkit (native, Electron, Qt, GTK, Cocoa, WPF, WinUI, Win32). Unlike the web - where a single DOM-driving tool (Playwright / Selenium) covers every browser - each desktop OS exposes its own accessibility tree, and that tree is the substrate every reliable desktop test driver uses.

Per Microsoft Learn - UI Automation Win32 overview:

"Microsoft UI Automation is an accessibility framework that enables Windows applications to provide and consume programmatic information about user interfaces (UIs). … UI Automation also allows automated test scripts to interact with the UI."