Stephan Arlt

Stephan Arlt, Ishan Banerjee, Cristiano Bertolini et al.

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs), due to their event driven nature, present a potentially unbounded space of all possible ways to interact with software. During testing it becomes necessary to effectively sample this space. In this paper we develop algorithms that sample the GUI's input space by only generating sequences that (1) are allowed by the GUI's structure, and (2) chain together only those events that have data dependencies between their event handlers. We create a new abstraction, called an event-dependency graph (EDG) of the GUI, that captures data dependencies between event handler code. We develop a mapping between EDGs and an existing black-box user-level model of the GUI's workflow, called an event-flow graph (EFG). We have implemented automated EDG construction in a tool that analyzes the bytecode of each event handler. We evaluate our "grey-box" approach using four open-source applications and compare it with the current state-of-the-art EFG approach. Our results show that using the EDG reduces the number of test cases while still achieving at least the same coverage. Furthermore, we were able to detect 2 new bugs in the subject applications.

Stephan Arlt, Evren Ermis, Sergio Feo-Arenis et al.

In black-box testing of GUI applications (a form of system testing), a dynamic analysis of the GUI application is used to infer a black-box model; the black-box model is then used to derive test cases for the test of the GUI application. In this paper, we propose to supplement the test with the verification of the black-box model. We present a method that can give a guarantee of the absence of faults, i.e., the correctness of all test cases of the black-box model. The black-model allows us to formulate a parametrized verification problem. As we will show, it also allows us to circumvent the static analysis of the GUI tool kit. We have implemented our approach; preliminary experiments indicate its practical potential.