System testing of software applications with a
graphical-user interface (GUI) front-end requires that sequences of GUI events
that sample the application’s input space, be generated and executed as test
cases on the GUI. However, the context-sensitive behavior of the GUI of most of
today’s non-trivial software applications makes it practically impossible to
fully determine the software’s input space. Consequently, GUI testers automated
and manual working with undetermined input spaces are, in some sense, blindly
navigating the GUI, unknowingly missing allowable event sequences, and failing
to realize that the GUI implementation may allow the execution of some
disallowed sequences. In this paper, we develop a new paradigm for GUI testing,
one that we call Observe-Model-Exercise* (OME*) to tackle the challenges of
testing context-sensitive GUIs with undetermined input spaces. Starting with an
incomplete model of the GUI’s input space, a set of coverage elements to test,
and test cases, OME* iteratively observes the existence of new events during
execution of the test cases, expands the model of the GUI’s input space,
computes new coverage elements, and obtains new test cases to exercise the new
elements. Our experiment with 8 open-source software subjects, more than
500,000 test cases running for almost 1,100 machine-days, shows that OME* is
able to expand the test space on average by 464.11 percent; it detected 34
faults that had never been detected before.
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