A visual test development environment for GUI systems

Abstract

We have implemented an experimental test development environment (TDE) intended to raise the effectiveness of tests produced for GUI systems, and raise the productivity of the GUI system tester.The environment links a test designer, a test design library, and a test generation engine with a standard commercial capture/replay tool. These components provide a human tester the capabilities to capture sequences of interactions with the system under test (SUT), to visually manipulate and modify the sequences, and to create test designs that represent multiple individual test sequences. Test development is done using a high-level model of the SUT's GUI, and graphical representations of test designs. TDE performs certain test maintenance tasks automatically, permitting previously written test scripts to run on a revised version of the SUT.