GUI Interaction Testing: Incorporating Event Context

Abstract

Abstract-Graphical user interfaces (GUIs), due to their event driven nature, present an enormous and potentially unbounded way for users to interact with software. During testing it is important to "adequately cover" this interaction space. In this paper, we develop a new family of coverage criteria for GUI testing grounded in combinatorial interaction testing. The key motivation of using combinatorial techniques is that they enable us to incorporate "context" into the criteria in terms of event combinations, sequence length, and by including all possible positions for each event. Our new criteria range in both efficiency (measured by the size of the test suite) and effectiveness (the ability of the test suites to detect faults). In a case study on eight applications, we automatically generate test cases and systematically explore the impact of context, as captured by our new criteria. Our study shows that by increasing the event combinations tested and by controlling the relative positions of events defined by the new criteria, we can detect a large number of faults that were undetectable by earlier techniques.

Automated testing of GUI applications: Models, tools, and controlling flakiness

“…PRESENTERS Myra Cohen and Atif Memon are the architects of this tutorial. They have expertise in testing graphical user interfaces, testing configurable software, and in experimental software engineering, all of which form the core content of the tutorial, and they have collaborated on recent papers on the state of the in GUI testing [6]- [8]. Atif Memon developed the GUITAR framework that is used for demonstration in this tutorial.…”

AutoBlackTest: Automatic Black-Box Testing of Interactive Applications

“…We setup GUI-TAR to use the Event Interaction Graph (EIG) as model for test case generation, since it increases the fault detection effectiveness of the generated test case, according to the authors [7], [18]. We ran a few testing sessions with different initial models to confirm that EIG is the best option.…”

“…The generation process is influenced by the length of the abstract test cases, which are shorter than the corresponding concrete test cases. The authors of the GUITAR paper suggest to use abstract test cases no longer than 10 [7]. To find an appropriate length for the experiment, we applied GUITAR to the case studies looking for configurations that terminates the test case generation in at most 6 hours (50% of the budget).…”

“…Recent work on automated test generation exploits GUI coverage metrics that measure how many of the events produced by widgets have been stimulated in the testing process [6], [7]. These metrics evaluate how many widgets a test suites "touched", but do not provide information about the computations that have been covered.…”

“…In the first phase, they generate a model of the event sequences that can be produced by interacting with the GUI of the application under test. In the second phase, they generate a set of test cases that cover the sequences in the model [6], [7]. Different techniques focus on different models and various coverage criteria, such covering system events [8] or semantically interacting events [9].…”