Automated functionality testing through GUIs

Model-based GUI testing (MGT) is emerging as a promising approach for testing applications with a graphical user interface (GUI). Currently, test models in MGT approaches are close to the GUI implementation with limited ability to represent abstract actions. This paper introduces the Action-Event Framework (AEF), a MGT framework. This framework helps testers abstract away from low-level details of the GUI under test and generate test cases in a behaviour-oriented way. In this framework, testers can perform both business logic testing and GUI testing in a reusable manner. At the core of AEF is a mapping language that allows test engineers to map abstract actions to GUI implementations. The paper proposes several coverage criteria based on links between abstract actions and event sequences. Tool support is provided for several steps of the framework. To evaluate AEF, a case study on a task manager is conducted to determine the time necessary to test the GUI, the types of defects that can be detected, and the correlation between the proposed coverage criteria and code coverage.