GUICat: GUI testing as a service

Abstract

GUIs are event-driven applications where the flow of the program is determined by user actions such as mouse clicks and key presses. GUI testing is a challenging task not only because of the combinatorial explosion in the number of event sequences, but also because of the difficulty to cover the large number of data values. We propose GUICat, the first cloud-based GUI testing framework that simultaneously generates event sequences and data values. It is a white-box GUI testing tool that augments traditional sequence generation techniques with concolic execution. We also propose a cloud-based parallel algorithm for mitigating both event sequence explosion and data value explosion, by distributing the con-colic execution tasks over public clouds such as Amazon EC2. We have evaluated the tool on standard GUI testing benchmarks and showed that GUICat significantly outperforms state-of-the-art GUI testing tools. The video demo URL is https://youtu.be/rfnnQOmZqj4.