PhD RESEARCH

 

FUNCTIONAL TESTING OF GUI-BASED APPLICATIONS WITH THE ACTION-EVENT FRAMEWORK

 

 

Capture/replay is an approach for testing GUI-based applications. This approach presents two problems. First, test execution is automated but test generation is not. The tester has to determine what event sequences have to be tested and manually record every sequence. Second, test scripts are close to the implementation and lack abstraction. There is limited separation between business logic and implementation details in test scripts, making them hard to maintain. This paper introduces the Action-Event Framework (AEF), which addresses these two issues. AEF proposes to model business logic of the system under test in an action model. The tester uses this action model to generate business logic test cases and tests the business logic layer of the system. To convert business logic test cases into GUI test cases, AEF introduces a mapping model which maps each action in the action model to GUI test scripts which are recorded in advance. In reality, an abstract action can be performed in various ways through the GUI; therefore, the mapping must be able to account for that variety. We propose AEFMAP, an action-to-event mapping language to write mapping models. The GUI test cases are executed against the GUI to test system functionalities. This paper introduces a prototype tool which allows testers to map Spec# action models to test scripts recorded in Quick Test Pro. The paper presents preliminary evaluations of testing effort, defect-detection ability, and usability of AEF.

 

Introduction slides: at ACSC 2010, at AST 2010

Tool support (BETG and GTG)

 

RESEARCH INTERESTS

 

Software verification and validation.

Software project management.

Neural networks.

 

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