Hierarchical GUI Test Case Generation UsingAutomated

|The widespread use of GUIs for interacting with software is leading to the construction of more and more complex GUIs. With the growing complexity comes challenges in testing the correctness of a GUI and its underlying software. We present a new technique to automatically generate test cases for GUIs that exploits planning, a well developed and used technique in artiicial intelligence. Given a set of operators, an initial state and a goal state, a planner produces a sequence of the operators that will transform the initial state to the goal state. Our test case generation technique enables eecient application of planning by rst creating a hierarchical model of a GUI based on its structure. The GUI model consists of hierarchical planning operators representing the possible events in the GUI. The test designer deenes the preconditions and effects of the hierarchical operators, which are input into a plan-generation system. The test designer also creates scenarios that represent typical initial and goal states for a GUI user. The planner then generates plans representing sequences of GUI interactions that a user might employ to reach the goal state from the initial state. We implemented our test case generation system, called Planning Assisted Tester for grapHical user interface Systems (PATHS), and experimentally evaluated its practicality and eeectiveness. We describe a prototype implementation of PATHS and report on the results of controlled experiments to generate test cases for Microsoft's WordPad.