An ontology-based approach for GUI testing

Abstract

As Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) have almost become ubiquitous for users to interacting with software system, GUI testing becomes an essential task. GUI testing, whose basic steps are test case generation and execution result validation, is a knowledge intensive process that requires both knowledge of GUI systems and testers' experience. In this paper, an ontology-based approach is proposed to make test case generation much effective by involving testers' experience. The approach first establishes a GUI testing ontology by analysing source code with reverse engineering techniques. Next test case generation rules which used to generate test cases are extracted from testers' experience. Then the proposed approach is evaluated. Finally conclusions are drawn and further research directions are speculated. © 2009 IEEE.