Automated GUI Testing Guided by Usage Profiles

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“Automated GUI Testing Guided by Usage Profiles” by Penelope Brooks and Atif M. Memon. In ASE '07: Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering, (Washington, DC, USA), 2007.

Abstract

Most software developed in recent years has a graphical user interface (GUI). The only way for the end-user to interact with the application is through the GUI. Hence, acceptance and system testing of the software requires GUI testing. This paper presents a new technique for regression testing of GUI applications. Information on the actual usage of the application, in the form of “user profiles,” is used to ensure that a new version of the application will function correctly. User profiles, sequences of events that end-users execute on a GUI, are used to develop a probabilistic usage model of the application. An algorithm uses the model to generate test cases that represent events the user is most likely to execute. Reverse engineering methods are used to extract the underlying structure of the application. An empirical study on four open source GUI applications reveals that test suites generated from the probabilistic model are 0.2-22 percent of the size of test suites produced directly from user profiles. Furthermore, the test suites generated from the model detect more faults per test case than those detected directly from the user profiles, and detect faults not detected by the original profiles.

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BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{BrooksMemonASE2007,
   author = {Penelope Brooks and Atif M. Memon},
   title = {Automated GUI Testing Guided by Usage Profiles},
   booktitle = {ASE '07: Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE international
	conference on Automated software engineering},
   publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
   address = {Washington, DC, USA},
   year = {2007}
}

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