Research On Hireachical Incremental Automated Testing Of GUI

Automated testing of Graphical User Interface(GUI) software is one of the emergency of modern software industry, because there are many challenges unsolved in current testing tools: hard to regress test, corverage difficult to compute, complicated test script. Aiming at a utility technology of GUI auto-testing, we design a scheme of Hierarchical Incremental Auto Testing(HIAT), explore 4 main technologies in auto-test system, and implement an auto testing system, which called HGAT.GUI software has clearly hierarchy, so HIAT divides the GUI Testing into two partition: intra-window testing and inter-window testing. Using window as a unit, HIAT builds software model with Hierarchical Finite State Mechine (HFSM) incrementally. HIAT uses Unify Design Methods to generate test data, so as to reduce the complexity of test data. To find the faults of design earlier, HIAT gets the test expected result with the specification of AUT(application under test), so that to verify the consistency between software design and implementation. HIAT defines two criterions to measure the quality of the test case collect, that is, reusability and path coverage. HIAT itself is general and incremental too, which is the trend of software test.HGAT is based on HIAT. HGAT take use of GUI repesentation based on object. Stores test data in XML files. Test script keeps unchanged and universal for all test cases, enhanced functions can be added into test control base. Impement four methods of verification: simple object verify, specific object verify, lump verify, and just enough verify.To verify the rationality and validity of HIAT, implement HGAT in C#.NET, and test a small GUI software as experiment. The result shows that, unify design methods makes the test data high representativity and low complexity. There is a test data file and test verify file for each window, test file has high independency and reusability. High path coverage.