Research Of Test Cases Generation For Graphical User Interface Based On Petri-net Model

Graphical User Interface is an essential component of today's software. A GUI is the front-end to underlying code. It makes the software easy to use and it's widely used now. The software with GUI have many characteristics different from those of traditional software, and thus, GUI testing has remained a not throughly studied area which needs more research.The main work in this paper of GUI testing is as follows: the first is formal representation of GUI and the second is the generation of test case.Petri net is a graphical and mathematic tool which can be used in many systems and fields. Applying Petri net to represent GUI, we can describe and simulate the dynamic characteristics of the system. The paper proposes GUI models based on basic Petri net, explains how to applying this Petri net to model a practical GUI and gives an instance of modeling. Since the generation of GUI test case is based on Finite State Machine (FSM), this paper also studies the conversion of a Petri net to a FSM. It proposed a theorem of conversion and proved it. We also give a conversion algorithm and apply it to convert a Petri-net GUI model instance to a FSM GUI model. The GUI testing case generation is based on coverage.It takes three steps: the first is to generate a sub-sequence which meets the coverage criteria and all the conditions need to meet, the second is to generate the expected states and the third is to link all the effective sub-sequences to a target test case. The method is described in this paper and an example is given.