Lightweight Static Analysis for GUI Testing

Abstract

Abstract-GUI testing is an active research area. The open challenge is the judicious generation of event sequences(an event sequence encodes a user interaction). A major advance in this direction is the use of a black-box model to systematically generate event sequences that are executable on the GUI. The black-box model can be, e.g., an Event Flow Graph (EFG) or an Event Sequence Graph (ESG). In this paper we propose a new approach to select relevant event sequences among the event sequences generated by a blackbox model. We express the relevance of an event sequence by a precisely defined dependency between a fixed number of events in the event sequence. Departing from a pure blackbox approach we apply a static analysis to the bytecode of the application. This allows us to infer a dependency graph, which we call Event Dependency Graph (EDG). We use the EDG together with a black-box model to construct a set of relevant event sequences among the executable ones. We have implemented our approach in a new tool. We evaluate the approach on four open source GUI applications. With the specific choice of a lightweight static analysis, the approach scales to large applications and, at the same time, leads to an informed selection of event sequences. Using our approach we are able to find previously undetected bugs.

Automatically repairing broken workflows for evolving GUI applications

“…Various techniques have been developed to automate GUI testing including model creation [12], test generation [1,44], test execution [39], and test oracle selection [27]. For example, GUI-TAR [27,39,40] is a GUI testing framework for Java and Microsoft Windows applications; it generates event sequence-based test cases for GUI programs using a structural event generation graph.…”

Towards a GUI Test Model Using State Charts and Programming Code

“…In the automotive domain, UML state charts are "widely established in HMI specification and development" [2, P. 24]. Various approaches for MBT of GUIs use state based modeling ( [5][6][7][8][9]). A widely used technique for model based GUI testing is reverse engineering, i.e., executing the application and analyzing the GUI ( [5][6][7]).…”

“…Various approaches for MBT of GUIs use state based modeling ( [5][6][7][8][9]). A widely used technique for model based GUI testing is reverse engineering, i.e., executing the application and analyzing the GUI ( [5][6][7]). However, as these approaches rely on the availability of source code, reverse engineering is not applicable in our domain.…”

Automated testing with targeted event sequence generation

“…Other related approaches are based entirely on abstract models of the applications [21,24] or only involve the application code for extracting, for example, available event handlers and basic information on how they access shared state [4,18]. Common to these approaches is that they cannot effectively reach branches of the application code that are highly constrained by the event parameters.…”

“…This means that a simple backward search toward the application entry would likely lead to an explosion of different paths to consider. To address this problem, we draw inspiration from another source: the model-based testing technique by Arlt et al [4]. In model-based testing of event-driven applications, test inputs are constructed from a finite-state abstraction of the user interface behavior that shows how the event handlers are connected.…”