The Synergy Between User Experience Design and Software Testing

Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. Model-based testing (MBT) is a systematic approach to testing where using formal models enables automatic generation of test cases and test oracle. Although the results of applying MBT in practice are promising, creating formal models is an obstacle for wide-spread use of MBT in industry. In this paper we will address how increasing the cooperation between testers and user experience designers can help with the overall challenge of applying MBT. We present a test automation approach based on Task Models and Microsoft Spec Explorer model-based testing tool to improve software testing. Task Model is a formal model to specify the high-level interaction between the user and the graphical user interface (GUI). We developed a tool, called UXSpec, to convert Task Models to the input models of Spec Explorer, allowing us to do functional testing with little modeling effort, due to usage of already existing models. We demonstrate this by applying our approach to an industrial-size case study.