An Object Oriented Framework for User Interface Test Automation

Software testing is an important stage in the software projects lifecycles. It is one of the most expensive stages. Effective testing automation is expected to reduce the cost of testing. GUI is increasingly taking a larger portion of the overall program’s size and its testing is taking a major rule in the whole project’s validation. GUI test automation is a major challenge for test automation. Most of the current GUI test automation tools are partially automated and require the involvement of the users or testers in several stages. This paper is about a proposed framework for user interface test automation that uses object oriented features to build the tested model. The GUI model is parsed from the application under test at run time. The GUI model is built as an XML tree that represents the GUI hierarchical structure. Test cases are then generated from the XML tree using different proposed algorithms. Some techniques for test case prioritization and critical path testing are suggested to minimize the number of required test cases to generate, that ensure an acceptable level of test adequacy or branch coverage. The framework is concluded with test execution and verification part that execute the generated test cases and compare them with the original test suite. The advantages of the object oriented approach over the widely used capture/replay back one, is in the fact that the model is generated at run time which makes it represents the current state of the GUI model. In record/play back cases, we have to retest the application in case of any change in the functionalities or the GUI of the program. Once utilized, this object oriented approach is expected to be less expensive as it does not require users to manually test the application.