TESTAR – from academic protoype towards an industry-ready tool for automated testing at the User Interface level

Abstract

Testing applications with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) is an important, though challenging and time consuming task. The state of the art in the industry are still capture and replay tools, which may simplify the recording and execution of input sequences, but do not support the tester in finding fault-sensitive test cases and leads to a huge overhead on maintenance of the test cases when the GUI changes. While search-based test case generation strategies are well researched for various areas of testing, relatively little work has been done on applying these techniques to an entire GUI of an application. In this paper we present the tool TESTAR, an automated search-based approach to test applications at the GUI level whose objective is to solve part of the maintenance problem by automatically generating test cases based on a structure that is automatically derived from the GUI.