학술논문

Guess the State: Exploiting Determinism to Improve GUI Exploration Efficiency
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering IIEEE Trans. Software Eng. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on. 50(4):836-853 Apr, 2024
Subject
Computing and Processing
Graphical user interfaces
Testing
Test pattern generators
Generators
Behavioral sciences
Knowledge based systems
Q-learning
Web testing
system testing
state inference
Language
ISSN
0098-5589
1939-3520
2326-3881
Abstract
Many automatic Web testing techniques generate test cases by analyzing the GUI of the Web applications under test, aiming to exercise sequences of actions that are similar to the ones that testers could manually execute. However, the efficiency of the test generation process is severely limited by the cost of analyzing the content of the GUI screens after executing each action. In this paper, we introduce an inference component, Sibilla, which accumulates knowledge about the behavior of the GUI after each action. Sibilla enables the test generators to reuse the results computed for GUI screens that recur multiple times during the test generation process, thus improving the efficiency of Web testing techniques. We experimented Sibilla with Web testing techniques based on three different GUI exploration strategies (Random, Depth-first, and Q-learning) and nine target systems, observing reductions from 22% to 96% of the test generation time.