The Study And Implement Of XML-based GUI Record-Replay Technology

With the development and standardization of the Software Enginerring, the demands for software quality are more attentioned. Meanwhile, as a necessary phase of software Product Life Circle (PLC), software testing is important in the PLC, and now, automatic testing is the trend of software testing. Graphical User Interface (GUI) tesing is a main part of software tesing. Till now, there are mainly three types of automatic testing tools for it. The first is to write a program to replay GUI operation in a powerfull script language. This method is fully dependt on the script language functions lib, and it is too complex to learn and master it. The second is first to form text-format GUI operation script, then parse the script text to replay the test results. In this way, the script is simple, but the effect is limited. Both of these two types are not suitable for Java GUI. The third one is the combination of those two types mentioned above, it can record test script, and also insert function methods into the script, so, most strong functions it has. In this paper, the techniques for GUI automatic test are analysed, the advantages and disadvantages of these two types compared, a scheme which is based on XML and employed for Java GUI record and replay testing is proposed. By using XML document to restore the GUI test script makes the structure of test script well-orgnized and easy to read, and the test script can contain more items due to the strong expansibility of XML document, which enhanses the functions of GUI test. What's more, focus on the current situation of GUI automatic test that simple functions are provided in the test tools and more utilities or tools are needed in test activity, conbinating with the author's experince of studing and working on the regular testing activity, new GUI testing tools architechture that integrating much more test process functions such as FTP service, Mail service into a single testing framework has been proposed, makes the GUI test activity much more efficiency. A prototype of testing tool (named GUIRobot) based on this new technical solution has been well-designed and implemented in this paper, which uses the features of Java Class Dynamical Loading and strong support on XML parsing. Functions of Record –Replay based on XML have been implemented, and relative test process functions are tried to integrate into this automaic testing framework. Sufficient tests for GUIRobot test framework have been designed and performed, the test cases cover the copatibility of different OS, the availability of new solution, the accuracy and efficiency of record/replay process. At the other side, integrated test process utilies have been tested in the GUIRobot framework, validated that the integraed test framework are available and much more worthy. From the test results of the prototype testing, the new XML technical solution has reached the expectant target.