A GUI Environment to Manipulate FSMs for Testing GUI-based Applications in Java

The development of GUI-based applications has raised a lot of new issues, one of them being how to effectively test complicated graphical user interactions. In this paper, we present a visual environment for manipulating test specifications of GUI-based applications in Java. In our approach, the internal representation of a test specification, which contains the contexts of GUI input and output, is generated interactively by running the Application Under Test (AUT). In this way, existing testing tools, such as tools for test case generation, can possibly be applied on it. We provide a graphical interface to obtain such kind of internal test specifications so that testers do not need to know the details of the internal representation, and the test specification can be easily modified. We present our running prototype which let users graphically manipulate the test specification given in the form of a Finite State Machine, and the implementation of AUT is a GUI-based Java application.