Classifying and Qualifying GUI Defects
This work addresses the need for improved GUI testing techniques for software developers and testers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing fault modeling approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of GUI testing by proposing a comprehensive fault model to classify GUI defects, and it empirically validates the model against real failures and assesses existing testing tools, with the mutants developed being made freely available for benchmarking.
Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are integral parts of software systems that require interactions from their users. Software testers have paid special attention to GUI testing in the last decade, and have devised techniques that are effective in finding several kinds of GUI errors. However, the introduction of new types of interactions in GUIs (e.g., direct manipulation) presents new kinds of errors that are not targeted by current testing techniques. We believe that to advance GUI testing, the community needs a comprehensive and high level GUI fault model, which incorporates all types of interactions. The work detailed in this paper establishes 4 contributions: 1) A GUI fault model designed to identify and classify GUI faults. 2) An empirical analysis for assessing the relevance of the proposed fault model against failures found in real GUIs. 3) An empirical assessment of two GUI testing tools (i.e. GUITAR and Jubula) against those failures. 4) GUI mutants we've developed according to our fault model. These mutants are freely available and can be reused by developers for benchmarking their GUI testing tools.