Research On Automated Regression Testing Technologies Of GUIs

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) constitute a vital part of the today's software. Since the functionality of the application is invoked through GUI, GUI testing plays a critical role in today's software testing. Because GUIs are typically created using rapid prototyping, regression testing of GUIs is becoming increasingly important. There exist many commercial tools for testing GUIs, which are Capture-Playback mechanism-based. However, they haven't provided enough support for regression testing of GUIs. Based on the research work of the national high-tech development project (863 project) "Research on software support system based on high performance broad-band communication network", our study focuses on automated regression testing of GUIs.In this thesis, the characteristics and challenges of GUIs testing are analyzed. After analyzing the commercial tools, we propose an improved data-driven testing framework, automating the process of test cases generation, test results verification and test case maintenance, which effectively supports regression testing of GUIs. It makes GUIs testing much more efficient and effective because it can not only greatly decrease the times of HMI (Human Machine Interaction) during test cases generation but simplify test cases maintenance and ever labor-intensive verification process. Besides, the module design and the prototype implementation are presented based on our framework named GARTA. And a conclusion and future work are given.The research results can be applied into automated testing of software with GUIs, which can not only improve the degree of automation in testing, but decrease the cost for testing and make software quality assured.