A metaheuristic approach to test sequence generation for applications with a GUI

Abstract

As the majority of today's software applications employ a graphical user interface (GUI), it is an important though challenging task to thoroughly test those interfaces. Unfortunately few tools exist to help automating the process of testing. Despite of their well-known deficits, scripting- and capture and replay applications remain among the most common tools in the industry. In this paper we will present an approach where we treat the problem of generating test sequences to GUIs as an optimization problem. We employ ant colony optimization and a relatively new metric called MCT (Maximum Call Tree) to search fault-sensitive test cases. We therefore implemented a test environment for Java SWT applications and will present first results of our experiments with a graphical editor as our main application under test. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.