Design And Implementation Of A GUI Testing Plugin For The Eclipse Platform

Software testing is a critical element of software quality assurance and takes the much of elapse time of the software development life cycle. Improving the testing time and optimizing the techniques will always result in quick and efficient delivery of software products, as well as increase in customer satisfaction. In this direction, GUI testing (Graphical user interface testing) is the process of testing a product’s graphical user interface through a variety of test cases to ensure it meets its written specifications.GUI testing belongs to the category of functional testing (black box testing) with an aim to the judgment of the correctness of the physical user interface and product’s business functions. Early stage GUI testing was mainly carried out manually. The main difficulty that manual testing was faced with is the regression testing, test results depended on testers’ ability and experience, and regression testing was time-consuming. After that things changed with the emergence of automated GUI testing tools; they automated regression testing by generating GUI test cases once and running them many times. At present time, there are five methods for generating GUI test cases, among which are recording/playback technology, test data generation based on finite state automata, UML-based test cases generation, test data generation based on artificial intelligence methods, and event flow diagram-based generation. On the basis of survey on current GUI test methods and tools, this thesis propose to develop a GUI testing plugins with the help from the increasingly popular Java integrated development environment Eclipse.This thesis systematically analyzes an automated GUI testing tool Jacareto, designs and implements a plugin version GUI testing through recording/playback technology based on Java event handling. For this purpose, we carry on the designs of plugin functions and interfaces, and describe the details of their implementation. The plugin consists of five main modules:event capture, event replay, event representation, component manager, and event recorder. Experiments show that the plugin’s effectiveness and usability, it can greatly facilitate the work of developers and testers.