Reverse engineering of GUI models for testing

Abstract

The incorrect behaviour of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) can compromise the effective use of the overall software application. One way to discover defects and increase the quality of GUIs is through testing. Test cases can be created manually or produced automatically from a model of the GUI. The size and complexity of GUIs makes it unpractical to do extensive manual testing. However, creating a model of the GUI in order to generate automatically test cases is also a laborious task. This paper presents a reverse engineering approach for diminishing the effort required for constructing the model of an existing GUI. The GUI is exercised by a combination of manual and automatic exploration, and information about its structure and some of its behaviour is automatically extracted, resulting in an incomplete GUI model. This model is subsequently completed manually, validated and used as input for automatic test generation and execution.