Graphical User Interface Software Testing Research

Graphical user interface (GUI) is critical component of today' s software. Although the use of GUI continues to grow, GUI testing has remained a neglected research area. Since GUI software has characteristics that are different from conventional software, such as user events as input and graphical data as output, techniques developed to test conventional software cannot be directly applied to test GUI software. With the particular goals of automation and integration of techniques used in various phases of GUI software testing, this paper introduces a unified solution to the GUI software testing problem whose central component is an improved unified testing framework. In the framework, GUI is represented as a hierarchy of components, each used as a basic unit of testing. The framework also includes components such as a test coverage evaluator, test case generator, test executor, test oracle, and regression test manager. The implement technology of these components is studied and some of it is improved. Integration-tree-based coverage criteria is added to the coverage evaluator. A method to build a heuristic function for artificial intelligence plan is provided in the test case generator. A new functional structure of the test executor is given. The function structure of the test oracle is simplified. The algorithm of test oracle is improved. And the regression test manager is put forward to replace the original regression tester.