Critical Paths for GUI Regression Testing. Alexander K. Ames and Haward Jie. Univ. of California, Santa Cruz

1. Critical Paths for GUI
Regression Testing
Zheng-Wen Shen
2005/07/13

2. References
 Critical Paths for GUI Regression
Testing. Alexander K. Ames and Haward
Jie. Univ. of California, Santa Cruz
 http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~sasha/
S’04 – Topics in Software Engineering

3. Outline
 1. Introduction
 2. Background
 3. Methodology
 4. Evaluation
 5. Future Work
 6. Conclusion

4. 1. Introduction
 The goal of regression test selection analysis
is to answer the following question:
 To apply test selection to test suites, and
determine the critical unit tests to detect
which state are the critical paths to test.

5.  In describing GUI testing
 A state to be the result of a single user
action or manipulation of the GUI.
 There are paths between states.
 Critical path

6. 2. Background
 Manual Regression Testing
 The manual testing of the interface.
 A time-consuming and labor intensive
process.
 Automatic Regression Testing
 Capture/Replay tools
 The replay portion can be problematic.
 Unit Testing for GUIs

7. Comparison of Testing
Techniques

8. Conventional Process for GUI testing
Modified Process for GUI Testing

9. GUI call graphs
 A call graph as opposed to a CFG
 The vertices of the graphs represent the
states of the GUI
 The edges within the graph show action
taken in the manipulation of the GUI that
shall bring in from one state to the next.
 The weights represent how many times the
test traverses the same states.

10.  G = (V, S, e, x)
 p = [s1, s2, …, sn], n>2
 p = [s1, v1, s2, v2, …, vn-1, sn], n>2

11. GUI Regression Selection

12. 3. Methodology
 3.1 Assumptions
 3.2 Test Case Data Capture
 3.3 XML Parsing
 3.4 Unit Test

13. 3.1 Assumptions
 The test cases also have some
redundancy paths.
 The Standard GUI classes perform
according to the specification.
 The next version of the tested
software will not have any dramatic
changes.

14.  The applications being tested is that
given an implementation of the
applications with separate GUI and
non-GUI components.
 Pure frontend for presentation V.S.
backend or business logic layers.
 Our focus in testing is strictly on the
functionality of the user-interface.

15. 3.2 Test Case Data Capture
 To capture the test case data we use a
capture/replay tool – Abbot.
 Abbot has provided us with the test
case data in XML format.
 We introduce a testing aide that reads
the XML data.

16. The Abbot’s XML test script

17. 3.3 XML Parsing

18. 3.4 Unit Test
 After the critical paths have been
identified, we need to check the
correctness of the states.
 Use a JUnit regression framework.

19. 4. Evaluation
1. Jdai
2. Numerical Chameleon
3. Huckster
4. BeatsByDesign

20. 4.1 Data for test case parsing

21. Plotting exec time for number
of test cases

22. 4.2 Test Implementation

23. JDAI Testcase 1: Image Rotation

24. JDAI Testcase 2: Image Info Edit

25. 5. Future Work
 To build the next version to be
extensible with respect to the XML DTD.
 Automate the coding of the unit tests
directly from processing the captured
GUI test suites.

26. 6. Conclusion
 We see that GUI regression tests have
redundant steps which are critical to the
functioning of the GUI and deserve sufficient
testing.
 Performing the unit tests for critical states will
save much time and testing versus manually
trying to set up the tests without knowing
them or going through the manual testing
process.

27. Jdai (Java Digital Album Infrastructure)

28. Numerical Chameleon

29. Huckster

30. BeatsByDesign