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“Covering Array Sampling of Input Event Sequences for Automated GUI Testing” by Xun Yuan, Myra Cohen. And Atif M. Memon, in ASE '07: Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering, (Washington, DC, USA), 2007.
Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are the most important means used to interact with today's software; hence, GUI quality is becoming increasingly critical. Automated GUI testing techniques employ software models to generate sequences of GUI events, which are replayed automatically as test cases. Because of the enormous space of all possible event interactions that modern GUIs provide to end-users, it is important to carefully sample the space during testing. Current techniques sample this space by restricting test case length; at the same time, they inadvertently limit the test cases' fault detection effectiveness. In this paper, we borrow ideas from combinatorial interaction testing and leverage covering arrays to develop a new automated technique to generate test cases for GUIs. The key motivation behind using covering arrays is to generate longer sequences that are systematically sampled at a particular coverage strength. Covering arrays, to date, have not been effectively used in sampling event driven systems such as GUIs which maintain state. We leverage a “stateless” abstraction of GUIs that allows us to use covering arrays. Once the covering arrays have been generated, we reuse the abstractions to reinsert ordering relationships between GUI events, thereby creating executable test cases. A feasibility study on a well-studied GUI-based application shows that the new technique is able to detect a large number of previously-undetected faults at a reasonable cost.
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BibTeX entry:
@inproceedings{YuanCohenMemonASE2007,
author = {Xun Yuan and Myra Cohen and Atif M. Memon},
title = {Covering Array Sampling of Input Event Sequences for Automated
GUI Testing},
booktitle = {ASE '07: Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE international
conference on Automated software engineering},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Washington, DC, USA},
year = {2007}
}
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