Relationships Between Test Suites, Faults, and Fault Detection in GUI Testing

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“Relationships Between Test Suites, Faults, and Fault Detection in GUI Testing” by Jaymie Strecker and Atif M. Memon. In ICST '08: Proceedings of the First international conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, (Washington, DC, USA), 2008.

Abstract

Software-testing researchers have long sought recipes for test suites that detect faults well. In the literature, empirical studies of the ability of various testing techniques to detect faults in sample applications abound. Given the state of the art, however, even the best-designed empirical study of software testing faces unavoidable threats to validity. First, it is not clear to what extent the results of the study can be generalized. Second, it is hard to predict whether the faults a testing technique would detect in a given real application would be the most critical to developers and users. Addressing both issues, this work shows how understanding the context in which testing occurs in terms of factors likely to influence fault detection can make the results of empirical software-testing studies more readily applicable to new test subjects and new situations. To help validate this approach, an experiment investigates the relationship between test-suite- and fault-related factors and fault detection in the GUI testing of two fielded, open-source applications. Statement coverage and GUI-event coverage are found to be statistically related to the likelihood of detecting certain kinds of faults.

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BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{StreckerMemonICST2008,
   author = {Jaymie Strecker and Atif M. Memon},
   title = {Relationships Between Test Suites, Faults, and Fault Detection
	in GUI Testing},
   booktitle = {ICST '08: Proceedings of the First international
	conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation},
   publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
   address = {Washington, DC, USA},
   year = {2008}
}

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