An event interaction structure for GUI test case generation

Abstract

Graphical User Interface (GUI) has become an important part of current software. But it is difficult for conventional test methods to test GUI due to the large number of states and the complexity among the events interaction. This paper presents an event interaction structure to model GUI and an algorithm to generate GUI interactive test cases. In this structure, the interaction relationships among events focus on the sharing variables or data or exchange messages of the event-handlers. Then the GUI interactive test cases are generated by analyzing the reading or writing operations of events or sending and receiving messages between events. Experiment shows that, under the condition of assuring eventbased coverage rate, the number of effective GUI interactive test cases generated by our method is about 10 percent of the number of test cases generated by permutation and combination method.

Towards GUI test based on interactive event-flow model

“…3, and its formal description is as follows: According to the algorithm in section 3-C, we can get 6 effective and interactive test cases based on interactive event-flow model, and the lengths of them are all 3, which means that they all contain 3 GUI events. On the other hand, on condition that limiting the length of the test cases to a maximum of k [4], the numbers of the test cases that generated based on event-flow model are shown as Table III.…”

“…For example, users run the software system by clicking mouse and knocking keyboard [3]. We can simply generate GUI test cases by using the permutation and combination of the GUI events, but there will be some problems as follows [4,5]:…”