GUI-Based Performance Test Automation Framework For WPF Applications

With the increasing of software scale and complexity, people make more and more strict demands on software quality assurance. Performance, as one of important components in software quality, increasingly attracts people's attention, and is concerned during the whole process of software development. Performance testing is the foundation of performance related works. It ensures performance with different forms at different periods.Traditional performance testing is hardly performed on GUI. It is just applied to software server side, but ignores the performance issues on client side. However, there are its own applied fields for performance testing based on GUI. It is even mandatory in some special cases. Doing performance test on GUI manually will cost huge recourses, and there are many other issues, too. Doing it automatically is difficult since most automated testing tools and theories are just applied for functional testing.In this context, this paper researches GUI-based performance test automation framework for WPF applications. Firstly, it summarizes software performance testing and automated testing related theories, points out the features and applicable scope of GUI-based performance testing, and analyzes the factors which affect the cost and income of automated testing. Secondly, it discusses the particularities of GUI-based performance testing for WPF applications, obtains requirements of the testing framework, and carries out depth-research and optimizations for the key problem-the identification and operation for WPF controls. Thirdly, we design and implement the GUI-based performance test automation framework for WPF applications. It blends in key word driven, data driven and model design patterns. At last, we bring this framework into actual projects. It makes the automated performance testing and functional testing integrated, and receives wonderful feedback.