Call Stack Coverage for GUI Test-Suite Reduction

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“Call Stack Coverage for GUI Test-Suite Reduction” by Scott McMaster and Atif M. Memon. In Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2006), Nov. 2006.

Abstract

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are used as front-ends to most of todayÂ’s software applications; testing GUIs for functional correctness is needed to ensure the overall correctness of these applications. The event-driven nature of GUIs presents new challenges for testing. One important challenge is test suite reduction. Conventional reduction techniques/tools based on static analysis are not easily applicable due to the increased use of multi-language GUI implementations, callbacks for event handlers, virtual function calls, reflection, and multi-threading. Moreover, many existing techniques ignore event handlers from libraries, and fail to consider the context in which a handler executes. Consequently, they yield GUI test suites with seriously impaired fault-detection ability. This paper presents a new reduction technique based on the call stack coverage criterion. Call stacks may be collected for any executing program with very little overhead. An empirical study involving three large GUI-based applications shows that call stack based reduction provides an excellent tradeoff between reduction in test suite size and loss of fault-detection effectiveness.

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BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{McMasterMemonISSRE2006,
   author = {Scott McMaster and Atif M. Memon},
   title = {Call Stack Coverage for {GUI} Test-Suite Reduction},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Symposium on
	Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2006)},
   publisher = {IEEE Computer Society Press},
   month = nov,
   year = {2006}
}

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