Search based GUI Test Generation in Java - Comparing Code-based and EFG-based Optimization Goals

Mathias Menninghaus, Falk Wilke, Jan-Philipp Schleutker, Elke Pulvermüller

2017

Abstract

Modern software systems often communicate with their users by graphical user interfaces (GUI). While the underlying business logic may be fully covered by unit tests, the GUI mostly is not. Despite the widespread use of capture and replay tools, which leave the test generation of GUI tests to the user, recent research also focuses on automated GUI test generation. From the numerous approaches, which include symbolic execution, model-based generation, and random testing, search based test data generation seems to be the most promising. In this paper, we create GUI tests using hill climbing, simulated annealing and several genetic algorithms which deal differently with the sequence length and use multi or single objective algorithms. These different test data generators are compared in terms of runtime and coverage. All approaches are also compared using different optimization goals which are a high coverage of the event flow graph (EFG) of the GUIs and a high coverage of the underlying source code. The evaluation shows that the genetic algorithms outperform hill climbing and simulated annealing in terms of coverage, and that targeting a high EFG coverage causes the best runtime performance.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Menninghaus M., Wilke F., Schleutker J. and Pulvermüller E. (2017). Search based GUI Test Generation in Java - Comparing Code-based and EFG-based Optimization Goals . In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-250-9, pages 179-186. DOI: 10.5220/0006277801790186

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase17,
author={Mathias Menninghaus and Falk Wilke and Jan-Philipp Schleutker and Elke Pulvermüller},
title={Search based GUI Test Generation in Java - Comparing Code-based and EFG-based Optimization Goals},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2017},
pages={179-186},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006277801790186},
isbn={978-989-758-250-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Search based GUI Test Generation in Java - Comparing Code-based and EFG-based Optimization Goals
SN - 978-989-758-250-9
AU - Menninghaus M.
AU - Wilke F.
AU - Schleutker J.
AU - Pulvermüller E.
PY - 2017
SP - 179
EP - 186
DO - 10.5220/0006277801790186