Abstract
Acceptance testing for graphical user interfaces has long been recognised as a hard problem. At the same time, a full suite of acceptance tests written by the Onsite Customer has been a key principle of XP since it began [1]. It seems, however, that practice has lagged behind theory, with many practitioners still reporting weak or no acceptance testing. At XP2003, we presented our successes with text-based acceptance testing of a batch program [2]. In the past year we have extended this approach to apply to a user interface. We have developed an approach based on simulation of user actions via a record/replay layer between the application and the GUI library, generating a high-level script that functions as a use-case scenario, and using our text-based approach for verification of correctness. We believe this is an approach to GUI acceptance testing which is both customer- and developer-friendly.
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References
Beck, K.: Extreme Programming Explained. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1999)
Andersson, J., Bache, G., Sutton, P.: XP with Acceptance-Test Driven Development: A Rewrite Project for a Resource Optimization System. In: Marchesi, M., Succi, G. (eds.) XP 2003. LNCS, vol. 2675, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
TextTest is open source and can be downloaded from, http://sourceforge.net/projects/texttest
An entire chapter on writing a Video Store GUI with unit tests is present in Astels, D.: Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide Prentice Hall (2003); A discussion of refactoring with the same problem can be found in van Deursen, A. and Moonen, L.: The Video Store Revisited - Thoughts on Refactoring and Testing. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Extreme Programming and Flexible Processes in Software Engineering (XP 2002), Italy (2002)
PyGTK is available from, http://www.daa.com.au/james/pygtk/ . It comes as standard with Red Hat Linux versions 8.0 and onwards
http://www.centerline.com/productline/qcreplay/qcreplay.html
At least 6 record/replay tools for Java can be found at, http://www.junit.org/news/extension/gui/index.htm
The tool ’Android’ gives a beautiful example of the kind of low-level script you get from recording a test that does 1 + 2 = 3 in xcalc, http://www.wildopensource.com/larry-projects/article1.html
PyUseCase isn’t formally released at time of writing, though it hopefully will be by the time of XP 2000. It is in any case bundled with TextTest as TextTest itself uses it for its own testing (2004)
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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Andersson, J., Bache, G. (2004). The Video Store Revisited Yet Again: Adventures in GUI Acceptance Testing. In: Eckstein, J., Baumeister, H. (eds) Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering. XP 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3092. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24853-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24853-8_1
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