OpenHMI-tester: an open and cross-platform architecture for GUI testing and certification

Software testing is usually used to report and/or assure about the quality, reliability and robustness of a software in the given context or scenario where it is intended to work. This is specially true in the case of user interfaces, where the testing phase is critical before the software can be accepted by the final user and put in execution mode. This paper presents the design, and the later implementation as a contribution to the open-source community, of a Human-Machine Interface (HMI) testing architecture, named OpenHMI-Tester. The current design is aimed to support major event-based and open-source windowing systems, thus providing generality, besides some other features such as scalability and tolerance to modifications in the HMI design process. The proposed architecture has been also integrated as part of a complex industrial scenario, which helped to identify a set of realistic requirements of the testing architecture, as well as to test it with real HMI developers.