Using Xml for User Interface Documentation and Differential Evaluation

In any software product, the user interface is one of the most important parts that defines the communication between the user and the system. One of the challenges in user interfaces is in the ability to save its state at any time as in many cases, especially in problems such as power interruptions; there is a need to save the last “good” state. In some other cases, there is a need to see if the user interface state is changed or to compare the current state with a previous one. This is required for several possible cases such as: evaluation, and changes in requirements, design and implementation. The format used for storing the state of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) should be global and can be easily used by different types of applications (such as the XML format). A GUI state is usually defined as the overall combination of properties of all the components or widgets of the GUI. In this paper an alternative back end representation is proposed for user interfaces and their state from their original format within the applications. In this approach the user interface is converted to an XML file. This XML file represents the current state of the user interface. To avoid state explosion, in this representation the contents of the state considers only the structure of the user interface and ignores controls’ properties that are state irrelevant. A control property is considered as state relevant if it may cause a state change if its property is changed. For example, in a GUI control, the control name, ID, tag, etc are usually irrelevant to the GUI state change compared to the control location, color, or the “visibility” and “enable” properties which are state relevant. The XML file format is largely used and accepted by many software applications. It is the infrastructure language for web pages and database management systems. User interface documentation is useful for future evaluation and comparison and useful for stakeholders’ communication. In this research, it is also proposed for GUI testing activities such as regression testing where testing is triggered if there is a change in the state of the user interface. A tool is developed to automatically evaluate the possible changes of the user interface d. Several open source projects are used for testing and evaluation. In each case, different types of GUI state changes are designed, tested and evaluated.