Using tasks to automate regression testing of GUIs

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) present unique chal-lenges for software testing. In this paper, we demonstrate that a test suite originally used to test a GUI contains a large number of unusable test cases for the modied GUI. We present a novel technique to recreate unusable test cases by associating meta-information (called a task) with each test case. Tasks represent activities that can be performed by using the software. The sequence of events in a test case represents the actions needed to complete its associated task. Even when changes to the GUI make test cases unus-able, many tasks remain valid across successive GUI ver-sions. We experimentally show that our technique is able to automatically and efciently regenerate a large number of test cases