GUI Testing Based On Event Flow Graph

Testing is the most important approach to improve software reliability and assure software quality. At present, GUI is widely used in most modern software development. Therefore it's quite important and necessary to test GUI efficiently. Since the traditional software testing methods do not work well due to peculiar characteristics of GUI testing, such as event-drive, how to test GUI efficiently becomes the key point in the field of software testing.Most of the existing testing tools are based on record/playing mechanism and they implement regression testing by recording event sequence. When the business rules changed and the program needs to be modified, the tester has to rerecord event sequence. So these tools have using limitation. There are some testing methods based on other theories. However, they are very difficult to combine with practice because of the 'state explosion' problem. The paper proposes GUI Testing Based on Event Flow Graph (EFG) in order to resolve such problems.This method focuses on the characteristics of event-drive, adopts EFG as research method, and then generates event sequence by traversing event sequence. If the program changed, the tester only need to modify EFG, hence this method doesn't have the limitation of the record/playing testing mechanism. The method and the traditional testing method have the common disadvantage that there may be 'state explosion' if the imported EFG is huge. This paper provides a new strategy in order to solve the problem mentioned above. The strategy classifies the events by analyzing the relationship among events, and gains several event sets, then those event sets are denoted as new nodes of the Graph, and the directed edges are united synchronously. Finally, simplified EFG is formed. The traversing event method we described above can solve 'state explosion' problem.In addition, the paper provides coverage rule of testing and traversing rule for simplified EFG. Those rules explain how to generate event sequence by traversing EFG in detail. According to the testing steps provided in the paper, we have implemented the auto GUI testing tool by using reflection technique under .NET platform. While testing the real forms, it is obviously proved that the method can test GUI forms efficiently. Meanwhile the method not only improves efficiency but also saves time and costs of software testing.The testing method that bases on EFG not only solves the conflicts between the GUI testing theory and practice but also avoids the limitation caused by the dynamic change of...