Test generation for graphical user interfaces based on symbolic execution

  • Authors:

  • Svetoslav R. Ganov;Chip Killmar;Sarfraz Khurshid;Dewayne E. Perry

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA;iTKO Inc, Dallas, TX, USA;The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA;The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Automation of software test
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

While Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) have become ubiquitous, testing them remains largely ad-hoc. Since the state of a GUI is defined by a sequence of events on the GUI's widgets, a test input for a GUI is such an event sequence. Due to the combinatorial nature of the sequences, testing a GUI thoroughly is problematic and time-consuming. Moreover, the wide range of possible values for certain GUI widgets, such as a textbox, compounds the problem. This paper presents a novel test generation approach based on symbolic execution to obtain data inputs and enumerate event sequences that are likely to maximize code coverage of a GUI application. Key contributions are introducing the technique of symbolic execution in GUI testing (addressing a common weakness of traditional GUI testing frameworks) and performing symbolic execution over strings (in addition to primitives). Doing so minimizes the number of event sequences that form the resulting test suite. To determine feasibility of path conditions that arise in symbolic execution, we implement a solver for constraints over strings (in addition to primitives). We evaluate our test generation approach.