A new approach in GUI testing

Testing plays a critical role in quality assurance especially in some industries being highly regulated by standards and government regulations. Cost of testing often takes large percentage of the total project budget. Ironically, many of them do not really bring much intrinsic value in project development and quality improvement. Test suites are often buggy and not qualified for quality assurance purpose. Especially, GUI (Graphical User Interface) testing usually suffers from high cost but low return although many researches have been done and quite a few GUI testing tools are in the market as well. Currently, mainstream GUI testing tools are capture/replay based, which could record GUI navigation path and generate preliminary test skeleton. Test developers then manually turn the skeleton into full-fledged test script by adding behavior related verification code, which actually contributes the most of test development effort. Unfortunately, that type of test script is hardly reusable because any changes in user interface, including screen/windows redesign, different components and their layout, and different navigation strategy, will lead to re-capture and generate a new test skeleton and start the whole process over again.; In this thesis, a new testing methodology was introduced to simplify GUI testing process through extensive automation. It promotes an idea of classifying GUI testing into three major categories: application feature testing, user interface testing and navigation testing. Application feature testing is responsible for testing application's core functionality excluding user interface, i.e. the internal logic or so called “business rules”. User interface testing tests the look-n-feel for each individual GUI components and application's internal logic through the existing user interface. GUI navigation testing tests the transition between windows and/or dialogs. We found it is possible to construct GUI manipulating sequences to drive an application and performing verification based on feature test case, which provides a cost-effective alternative to traditional GUI testing. A GUI modeling technology, including screen flow specification, was introduced in order to capture and model GUI components and their layout, internal parameter mapping, system behavior and the windows/screen transition information. Finally, a testing framework was designed to support GUI testing activities and a simulation system was built as well.