Automated GUI testing guided by usage profiles

Most software developed in recent years has a graphical user interface (GUI). The only way for the end-user to interact with the software application is through the GUI. Hence, acceptance and system testing of the software requires GUI testing. This paper presents a new technique for testing of GUI applications. Information on the actual usage of the application, in the form of “usage profiles, ” is used to ensure that a new version of the application will function correctly. Usage profiles, sequences of events that end-users execute on a GUI, are used to develop a probabilistic usage model of the application. An algorithm uses the model to generate test cases that represent events the user is most likely to execute. Reverse engineering methods are used to extract the underlying structure of the application. An em-pirical study on four open source GUI applications reveals that test suites generated from the probabilistic model are 0.2-22 % of the size of test suites produced directly from us-age profiles. Furthermore, the test suites generated from the model detect more faults per test case than those de-tected directly from the usage profiles, and detect faults not detected by the original profiles