CleanMM/Docs/Execution/UI-Automation-Blocker.md

UI Automation Blocker

Status

Investigated and resolved locally after granting Accessibility trust to the calling process.

Goal

Add native macOS UI automation for AtlasApp using Xcode/XCTest automation targets.

What Was Tried

Attempt 1: Main project native UI testing

• Added stable accessibility identifiers to the app UI for sidebar and primary controls.
• Tried a generated UI-testing bundle path from the main project.
• Tried a host-linked unit-test bundle path to probe XCUIApplication support.

Result

• bundle.unit-test is not valid for XCUIApplication; XCTest rejects that path.
• The main-project UI-testing setup remained noisy and unsuitable as a stable repository default.

Attempt 2: Independent minimal repro

• Built a standalone repro under Testing/XCUITestRepro/ with:
  • one minimal SwiftUI app target
  • one UI test target
  • one test using XCUIApplication
• Generated the project with xcodegen
• Ran:

xcodebuild test \
  -project Testing/XCUITestRepro/XCUITestRepro.xcodeproj \
  -scheme XCUITestRepro \
  -destination 'platform=macOS'

Result

• The minimal repro builds, signs, launches the UI test runner, and gets farther than the main-project experiment.
• It then fails with:
  • Timed out while enabling automation mode.

Conclusion

• The dominant blocker is now identified as local macOS UI automation enablement, not Atlas business logic.
• Specifically, the current shell process is not trusted for Accessibility APIs, which is consistent with macOS UI automation bootstrap failure.
• After granting Accessibility trust to the terminal process, both the standalone repro and the Atlas main-project UI smoke tests succeed locally.

Evidence

Local permission check

swift -e 'import ApplicationServices; print(AXIsProcessTrusted())'

Initial result on this machine before granting Accessibility trust:

false

Current result after granting Accessibility trust:

true

Minimal repro location

• Testing/XCUITestRepro/project.yml
• Testing/XCUITestRepro/App/XCUITestReproApp.swift
• Testing/XCUITestRepro/UITests/XCUITestReproUITests.swift

Preflight helper

• scripts/atlas/ui-automation-preflight.sh

Outcome

• scripts/atlas/ui-automation-preflight.sh now passes on this machine.
• Testing/XCUITestRepro/ UI tests pass.
• Atlas main-project UI smoke tests pass through scripts/atlas/run-ui-automation.sh.

Remaining Constraint

• Native UI automation still depends on Accessibility trust being granted for the process that runs xcodebuild. On a new machine, run the preflight first.

2026-03-08 Update

• The current machine can still hit Timed out while enabling automation mode. even when AXIsProcessTrusted() returns true.
• The standalone repro under Testing/XCUITestRepro/ reproduced the same failure on 2026-03-08, which confirms the blocker is currently machine-level / environment-level rather than Atlas-product-specific.
• scripts/atlas/run-ui-automation.sh now retries after cleanup, and scripts/atlas/full-acceptance.sh now classifies the failure against the standalone repro before failing the product acceptance run.