Capture and Replay with Text-Based Reuse and Framework Agnosticism

Abstract

Abstract-Software systems need to be constantly tested, either to verify changes or to check conformance to requirements. The current leading approaches to automate GUI tests are coding and the use of Capture & Replay (C&R) tools. Coding is usually associated with (even if ad hoc) reuse strategies, but requires from the developer specialized knowledge about the adopted framework. On the other hand, even though C&R is able to promote faster automation, it raises maintainability and scalability issues in the long term due to scripts scattering and rework for each new test case, because usually there is no associated reuse strategy. In order to combine the benefits of both approaches, we propose: an abstract and framework-free representation of test actions captured during testing activities; a text-based strategy that matches a new test case with previously recorded test actions; and a C&R tool that implements these concepts in the mobile context. We developed and evaluated our strategy in the context of a partnership with Motorola Mobility, achieving a reuse ratio up to 71% with time gains similar to traditional C&R approaches when compared to coding.

A Systematic Survey on Android API Usage for Data-Driven Analytics with Smartphones

“…In surveyed studies corresponding to the GAT (i.e., GUI Automated Testing), CT (i.e., Crowdsourced Testing), APS (i.e., Automated Programming Support), and TRSGT (i.e., Test Recorder and Script Generator Technique) sub-research themes, except for the microphone data used in Li et al [86], app usage pattern, user interaction, and notification data, which are data types that belong to interaction sensing data, are used in more than one paper. This is because, in the case of CT, GAT, and TRSGT sub-research themes, interaction data was mainly used through AS API for crowd sourced testing, GUI automated testing, test recording and script generator technique related research [73,74,75,78,77,82,83,81,80]. In addition, the APS sub-research theme mainly used AS API-based interaction sensing data for automated programming support [85,137,84,86].…”

“…Click (including tapping) [17,18,87,88,30,28,70,69,68,67,66,132,73,74,75,78,77,84,86,79,82,83,81,80,139,15] 26…”

“…• Testing and programming support fields, such as graphical user interface (GUI) automated testing, crowdsourced system testing, programming support for developer, and app performance measurement [73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86].…”

Aiding exploratory testing with pruned GUI models

“…• We intend to integrate our GUI model tool with model-based GUI test case generation tools created in our research group [8,15,45] to obtain systematic testing as well beyond exploratory testing.…”

“…Regarding the creation of automated test cases for GUI-based applications, one can basically have two main approaches: (i) by capture-replay [5,8,22,39,60] with human aid; and (ii) by traversing some GUI model [7,12,36,37] built automatically.…”