The object-FMA based test case generation approach for GUI software exception testing

Abstract

The traditional exception testing usually utilizes the error-guessing approach or the equivalence class-partition method to generate test cases, which heavily depend on the experience of testers and easily make the exception testing omissive. In order to solve this problem, this paper introduces the SFMEA (Software Failure Mode Effect Analysis) to generate the exception testing cases for the GUI software by analyzing the failure modes of the controls and the control sets of the GUI software and then translating those failure modes directly into the exception test cases. In order to make the failure mode analysis sufficient, we first propose an object-based approach for the failure mode analysis (i.e. Object-FMA), and then utilize this approach to analyze the failure modes of the common controls in the Windows, and generate the database of the failure modes of the controls for guiding to design the test cases. In an actual GUI software-testing project, a case study is presented through comparing four diverse exception test suites. Three test groups with different experience use the error-guessing approach to generate three exception test suites respectively. Then one group is selected from these three groups to use this proposed Object-FMA approach to generate one exception test suite. The comparison results show that the exception testing cases generated by the Object-FMA approach not only are more sufficient than the ones generated by the error-guessing approach, but also detect more exceptions. This proposed Object-FMA approach can avoid to overreliance on the experience of testers during designing the exception testing cases. Moreover, this approach can ensure the quality of the exception testing cases from the methodological viewpoint. Thus, the feasibility and validity of this proposed Object-FMA approach are validated consequently.