A visual test development environment for GUI systems

ABSTRACT

We have implemented an experimental test development environment (TDE) intended to raise the effectiveness of tests produced for GUI systems, and raise the productivity of the GUI system tester.The environment links a test designer, a test design library, and a test generation engine with a standard commercial capture/replay tool. These components provide a human tester the capabilities to capture sequences of interactions with the system under test (SUT), to visually manipulate and modify the sequences, and to create test designs that represent multiple individual test sequences. Test development is done using a high-level model of the SUT's GUI, and graphical representations of test designs. TDE performs certain test maintenance tasks automatically, permitting previously written test scripts to run on a revised version of the SUT.

REFERENCES

• 1: M. Balcer , W. Hasling , T. Ostrand, Automatic generation of test scripts from formal test specifications, Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT '89 third symposium on Software testing, analysis, and verification, p.210-218, December 13-15, 1989, Key West, Florida, United States
• 2: QA Partner and QA Planner User's Guide, Segue Software, Inc., Newton Centre, MA 1996.
• 3: Mercury Interactive Home Page, http://www, mercint.com/, Mercury Interactive Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA. . .
• 4: SQA Robot, http://www, rational.com/products/ sqasuite/robot/, Rational Software Corp., Cupertino, CA.
• 5: JavaStar, http://www, suntest.com/JavaStar/JavaS- tar. htmi., SunTest, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Palo Alto, CA.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Testing tools (e.g., data generators, coverage testing)

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: Flow charts

  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Graphical user interfaces (GUI); Evaluation/methodology

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
GUI-based system, capture/reply, test coverage, test designer, test generation, test maintenance, test scenario, testing, visual editor