Distance-Based Weighted Prioritization for GUI Application Testing

Recording actual user interactions with a system is often useful for testing software applications. Users-session based test suites that contain records of such interactions often finds a complementary set of faults compared to test suites created by testers. This work utilizes such test suites and presents a new prioritization method that extends the existing combinatorial two-way inter-window prioritization by introducing weights on the distance between windows. We examine how a window distance between a pair of the parametervalue tuples influences the fault detection effectiveness. We evaluate several approaches used to calculate weights. Results show improvement over the original two-way inter-window prioritization technique, while the comparison of different weighting approaches reveals that a negative linear weighting calculation generally performs better in our experiments. The study demonstrates that the distance between windows in a pair is an important factor to consider in test suite prioritization, and that distinguishing windows by their order in a test case also improves the fault detection rate compared to using window labels that were utilized in previous methods. This work provides motivation for future work to develop general n-way combinatorial distance-based prioritization methods that take into account space and processing time requirements to address potential issues with large test suites.