Automating tasks in GUI Test Case Generation

In a software project lifecycle, the software testing phase is expensive. By efficiently automating the testing process, we can significantly decrease the overall cost of software development and maintenance. Today, testing Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) has become an essential part in project validation. Consequently, the need for automating GUI testing has gained importance but due to the large number of states to be tested, GUI test automation has become a major challenge. Most existing GUI test automation tools work on automating the process of test case generation but there is little research on automating the process of developing tasks for GUI test case generation. This proposal presents a novel approach for automating the process of developing the GUI test tasks. Our approach categorizes GUI controls into two sets based on whether they are interlinked or independent in the application. The independent controls can be tested individually while we create test tasks for the interlinked controls by deriving different sets of Linearly Independent paths that cover all the sequences of controls in the GUI application. This would create a set of sequences of controls that are valid and not redundant. Overall, we believe that the automation of creating tasks would provide an adequate coverage of the GUI system as well as support the process of Regression testing.