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Automatic Generation of GUI Test Inputs Using User Configurations

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Big Data, Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering (BCD 2018)

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 786))

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Abstract

GUI testing validates the functionality of a software-intensive system by exercising its GUI. Although much research on automatic generation of GUI test inputs has been conducted to reduce the cost of GUI testing, the current GUI test input generation techniques can miss testing the behavior of the system which is dependent on the user configuration, which may leave undetected the defects that appear only under a certain user configuration. In order to completely test the behavior of a system for all possible user configurations, this paper proposes a method that automatically generate GUI test inputs under all possible user configurations. Since testing all possible user configurations is infeasible for nontrivial systems, the method is designed such that the user can sample user configurations. Thus, the proposed method generates GUI test inputs for the behavior of the system dependent on user configurations in addition to the test inputs generated by the existing technique that does not consider user configurations. We implement our method as an automated tool for the Android framework and evaluate it with on five open-source Android apps. The evaluation results show that our method can indeed achieve additional code coverage while preserving code coverage achieved by the existing technique.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Activity is one of the user interface components in Android app, which provides a single functionality to its user. It contains Fragments and Widgets.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the MSIT (Ministry of Science and ICT), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (IITP-2018-2013-0-00717) supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information and communications Technology Promotion) and by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2017R1D1A3B03028609).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    Leegeun Ha, Sungwon Kang & Younghun Han

  2. Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, Republic of Korea

    Jihyun Lee

Authors
  1. Leegeun Ha
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  2. Sungwon Kang
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  3. Jihyun Lee
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Correspondence to Leegeun Ha .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Software Engineering and Information Technology Institute, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Michigan, USA

    Roger Lee

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Ha, L., Kang, S., Lee, J., Han, Y. (2019). Automatic Generation of GUI Test Inputs Using User Configurations. In: Lee, R. (eds) Big Data, Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering. BCD 2018. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 786. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96803-2_9

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