Abstract

SummaryCovering all the possible paths of the graphical user interface (GUI) with test scripts would take too much effort and result in serious maintenance issues. We propose complementing scripted testing with scriptless test automation using the open‐source testar tool. This paper gives a comprehensive overview of testar and its latest extensions together with the ongoing and future research. With this paper, we hope we can help and encourage other researchers to use testar for their GUI testing‐related research and pave the way for an international research agenda in GUI testing built upon stable and open‐source infrastructure.

Highlights

  • The world around us is strongly connected through software, and our daily lives have become dependent on software

  • Because the model only covers the area that has been visited during TESTAR execution, these metrics cannot be used for absolute measurement, but the coverage of individual test sequences can be compared or the combined coverage of all test runs on a specific system under test (SUT) version can be compared with the coverage of another version

  • This strategy means that, for each state, we strive to generate a set of sensible actions that should be appropriate to the widgets that they are executed on: buttons should be clicked, scroll bars should be dragged and text boxes should be filled with text

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The world around us is strongly connected through software, and our daily lives have become dependent on software. There is a need to complement the script-based approach with another automated way of testing through GUIs. In this paper, we will give a comprehensive introduction into TESTAR1, an open-source tool that implements a scriptless approach for completely automated test generation for web and Windows desktop applications. The novel extensions of TESTAR described in this paper include (i) active learning of state models (model inference) described in Section 5; (ii) support for using Selenium WebDriver instead of Windows Accessibility API for testing web applications; and (iii) integration into CI processes, and generating HTML reports. TESTAR – SCRIPTLESS TESTING THROUGH GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE stable and open-source infrastructure This enables researchers to concentrate on intelligent testing techniques while reusing existing automation facilities.

SCRIPT-BASED GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE TEST AUTOMATION
Manually recorded or written scripts
Test case generation based on manually created models
Test case generation based on inferred models
SCRIPTLESS GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE TEST AUTOMATION
Dumb test monkeys
Smart test monkeys
TESTAR
Obtaining the graphical user interface state
Deriving a set of actions
Select and execute one of these actions
Representation of states and actions
Runtime execution and modes
Test results
Comparing TESTAR to other similar tools
ADDING MEMORY TO THE MONKEY
Active learning of state models
Visualization
Model comparison for automated change detection
Test adequacy indicators
Offline oracles
Advanced derive actions
Filter actions
Triggering pre-specified actions
Advanced action selection
INDUSTRIAL CASE STUDIES
Results
Obtaining the state and test execution
Learning state models
Recording models
Actions
Test adequacy criteria
Oracle problem
Visualization and test reporting
CONCLUSIONS
Full Text
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