Industrial Adoption of Automatically Extracted GUI Models for Testing

Crafting the models for effective model-based testing (MBT) requires deep understanding of the problem domain and expertise on formal modeling, and creating the models manually from the scratch requires a significant amount of effort. When an existing system is being modeled and tested, there are various techniques to automate the process of producing the models based on the implementation. Especially graphical user interface (GUI) applications have been a good domain for reverse engineering and specification mining approaches, but the existing academic approaches have limitations and restrictions on the GUI applications that can be modeled, and none of them have been adopted by the industry for testing commercial software. Although using implementation based models in testing has restrictions and requires special consideration, the generated models can be used in automated testing and supporting various manual testing actions. In this paper we introduce an industrial approach and platform-independent Murphy tool set for automatically extracting state models for testing GUI applications.