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Test Data Generation Based on GUI: A Systematic Mapping

Authors:
Rodrigo Funabashi Jorge
Márcio Eduardo Delamaro
Celso Gonçalves Camilo-Junior
Auri Marcelo Rizzo Vincenzi

Keywords: Systematic Mapping Study; System Testing; Testing through GUI; Automated Test Data Generation

Abstract:
For the general case, the complete automation of test data generation is an undecidable problem, and many researches employ meta-heuristics trying to find a reasonable partial solution. System testing performed via Graphical User Interface (GUI) imposes extra challenge for automation due to hundreds and often thousands of possibilities of events that can be generated. This work presents a study rev{based on systematic mapping} aiming at identifying the state of the art and the state of the practice on the automation of system testing carried out via GUI. We employed the traditional protocol of mapping study to support the data collection. The work was carried out from 6th February 2012 to 1st May 2013 resulting in the selection of 39 out of 598 primary studies obtained with the application of the search strings. Some of these works used, besides functional testing criteria, structural testing criteria to guide meta-heuristics. In relation to meta-heuristics, the distribution of work was more uniform, with a slight majority using Genetic Algorithms for test data generation. There are few research groups working on this subject. One particular author is responsible for authoring more than 30% of the selected primary studies and can be considered a reference in the generation of test data from GUI. Some research problems identified are 1) the difficult to represent all the possible GUI interactions without cause state explosion, 2) the need to evaluate the techniques on large software products, and 3) the complexity to automate the representation of the GUI interactions by reducing the number of infeasible sequences of actions. end{abstract}

Pages: 240 to 246

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: October 12, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-367-4

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 12, 2014 to October 16, 2014