Comment 1 for bug 1291531

We would like _launch_test_application to be a function in a module, instead of a method in AutopilotTestCase.
With that, we would be able to make helper objects that encapsulate the logic about how to open them. We could just instantiate something like

system_settings_app = ubuntu_system_settings.SystemSettingsApp(launch=True) from any test that needs to interact with system settings.
We could wrap that into a fixture, so the app is closed when it's no longer needed and all the changes to the settings are reverted.

But currently this doesn't look as nice as it should because we need to pass the test case object as a parameter to everything with no real reason.