Research On Repairing GUI-Directed Regression Test Scripts

Graphical User Interface (GUI) is the most popular way to interactwith software system. With GUI spreading, GUI testing becomes a focus ofsoftware testing. Manual testing on GUI is tedious and laborious. Testautomation plays a key role in reducing high cost of testing GAPs(GUI-based APplications). In order to automate this process, testengineers write programs using scripting languages. These test scriptsare run repeatedly to determine if GAPs behave as desired.At present a lot of software products take gradual or iterative typedevelopment strategy. When developers change a GAP, regression tests canfail not only due to faults in the program but also due to out-of-datetest scripts that do not reflect the desired behavior of the program. Whenthis occurs, it is necessary to repair test scripts such that the testspass. Repairing test scripts for GAPs manually is difficult andtime-consuming, especially when the two respective GUIs from iterativeversions of GAPs have a big difference. Studying on maintaining andevolving test scripts is at an early stage. Most methods are used forhelping repairing test scripts, not directly being able to maintain andevolve test scripts. So based on studying on maintaining and evolvingGUI-directed test scripts, we offer a novel approach repairingGUI-directed test scripts so that they can test new versions of theirrespective GAPs which have a big difference on GUI. This approach comparesold test scripts with new test scripts for the same use cases to identify changes between GUI objects and locate test script statements that shouldbe modified, and then repairs old test scripts according to theinformation obtained from compares.The experiments show that the approach works well in maintaining andevolving GUI-directed test scripts so that they can test new versions oftheir respective GAPs. Meanwhile the repaired test scripts keep the sametest logics as the corresponding old test scripts.