Systematic reduction of GUI test sequences

Abstract

Graphic user interface (GUI) is an integral part of many software applications. However, GUI testing remains a challenging task. The main problem is to generate a set of high-quality test cases, i.e., sequences of user events to cover the often large input space. Since manually crafting event sequences is labor-intensive and automated testing tools often have poor performance, we propose a new GUI testing framework to efficiently generate progressively longer event sequences while avoiding redundant sequences. Our technique for identifying the redundancy among these sequences relies on statically checking a set of simple and syntactic-level conditions, whose reduction power matches and sometimes exceeds that of classic techniques based on partial order reduction. We have evaluated our method on 17 Java Swing applications. Our experimental results show the new technique, while being sound and systematic, can achieve more than 10X reduction in the number of test sequences compared to the state-of-the-art GUI testing tools.