Reverse engineered formal models for GUI testing

Abstract

This paper describes a process to reverse engineer structural and behavioural formal models of a GUI application by a dynamic technique, mixing manual with automatic exploration. The goal is to diminish the effort required to construct the model and mapping information needed in a model-based GUI testing process. A skeleton of a state machine model of the GUI, represented in a formal pre/post specification language, is generated automatically by the exploration process. Mapping information between the model and the implementation is also generated along the way. The model extracted automatically is then completed manually in order to get an executable model which can be used as a test oracle. Abstract test cases, including expected outputs, can be generated automatically from the final model and executed over the GUI application, using the mapping information generated during the exploration process.