Studying The Model-based Framework For Testing Graphical User Interfaces

Testing of GUIs takes an important part in the development of GUIs, which is the key to keep and improve the quality and reliability of software. GUIs have characteristics different from those of the traditional software, which make software easy to use from a user's perspective, so today's software developers are dedicating an increasingly large portion of software code to implementing GUIs, but on the other hand new problems and challenges come with too. By now, though some researchers both here and abroad have developed new GUI testing techniques, all these techniques are not compatible in various phases of GUI testing and they can't be integrated easily.With the particular goals of integration of techniques used in various phases of GUI testing, this paper introduces a unified solution. The core of the solution is an improved testing framework. Especially this paper puts emphasis on the phases of the framework, such as GUI representation, test case generation, regression testing, and so on. We mainly research the contents as the following:(1) This paper firstly summarizes what the GUI is, characteristics of GUI testing, GUI testing steps and a GUI testing framework. Then it proposes an improved framework, including the phases such as GUI representation, test case generation, test execution, test oracle, regression testing, and so on.(2) The paper studies GUI representation which is the base of the framework. We divide the test units and the levels of unit testing once more. We propose the new GUI representation and construct four GUI models used in various phases of GUI testing. The models are interface-invocation graphs, object-event-analysis graphs, event- relation-flow graphs and program-control-flow graphs.(3) The paper deeply investigates a difficult problem in GUI testing: test case generation and coverage evaluation. Studying the black-box and white-box testing, we firstly propose compound test case generation. Then we study and define coverage criterion which are suitable for compound testing and different GUI models. At last, we use an example to show the effectiveness of compound test case generation on improving test adequacy.(4) The paper studies test oracle. We firstly summarize test execution and execution monitor, and then we focus on studying test oracle and improving the algorithm for test oracle.(5) The paper studies regression testing phase of the framework and proposes new structure of regression tester, including test case checker, test case filter and test case repairer. At last, we use an example to illustrate it.In brief, the improved framework can improve the sufficiency, accuracy, flexibility of GUI testing theoretically, and meanwhile it has some practical values.