Using a Goal-Driven Approach to Generate Test Cases for GUIs

The widespread use of GUIs for interacting with software is leading to the construction of more and more complex GUIs. With the growing complexity comes challenges in testing the correctness of a GUI and the underlying software. We present a new technique to automatically generate test cases for GUIs that exploits planning, a well developed and used technique in artificial intelligence. Given a set of operators, an initial state and a goal state, a planner produces a sequence of the operators that will change the initial state to the goal state. Our test case generation technique first analyzes a GUI and derives hierarchical planning operators from the actions in the GUI. The test designer determines the preconditions and effects of the hierarchical operators, which are then input into a planning system. With the knowledge of the GUI and the way in which the user will interact with the GUI, the test designer creates sets of initial and goal states. Given these initial and final st...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Atif M. Memon, Martha E. Pollack, Mary Lou Soffa
• Keywords: Goal State, ICSE 1999, Software Engineering, Test Case, Test Case Generation