Automatic generation of GUI test inputs that incorporates user configurations

Abstract

GUI testing validates the functionality of a software-intensive system by exercising its GUI. Although much research on automatic generation of GUI test inputs has been conducted to reduce the cost of GUI testing, the current GUI test input generation techniques can miss testing the behavior of the system which is dependent on the user configuration, which may leave undetected the defects that appear only under a certain user configuration. In order to completely test the behavior of a system for all possible user configurations, this paper proposes a method that can automatically generates GUI test inputs under all user configurations. Since testing all possible user configurations is infeasible for nontrivial systems, the method derives reduced number of user configurations. We implement our method as an automated tool for the Android framework and evaluate it with on four open-source Android apps. The evaluation results show that our method can indeed detect more configuration-dependent faults than the existing model-based GUI test generation technique.