Challenges for Layout Validation: Lessons Learned

Abstract

Companies are migrating their software systems. The migration process contemplates many steps, UI migration is one of them. To validate the UI migration, most existing approaches rely on visual structure (DOM) comparison. However, in previous work, we experimented such validation and reported that it is not sufficient to ensure a result that is equivalent or even identical to the visual structure of the interface to be migrated. Indeed, two similar DOM may be rendered completely differently. So, we decide to focus on the layout migration validation. We propose a first visual comparison approach for migrated layout validation and experiment it on an industrial case. Hence, from this first experiment and already existing studies on image comparison field, we highlight challenges for layout comparison. For each challenge, we propose possible solutions, and we detail the three main features we need to create a good layout validation approach.

GUI visual aspect migration: a framework agnostic solution

“…However, none is directly applicable to our migration cases. Indeed, to apply this strategy one must before deal with several challenges (Bragagnolo et al, 2020b):…”

“…We performed a preliminary work (Bragagnolo et al, 2020b) to adapt image comparison to the validation of GUI migration. In this work, we reported several challenges that must be rst solved.…”

Risk and Complexity Assessment on the Context of Language Migration

“…All of these differences together mean that the migration of graphical constructs, both visual and behavioural ( [23]) are developed with assumptions that are not valid on the destination platform, and may require to be adapted or completely redeveloped during a migration process. [7,12,13,18,19] and many others have contributed in identifying the challenges and validation opportunities of GUI migration. Because of lack of time for further experiments we do not provide metrics for this challenge in this article.…”