Maintaining and evolving GUI-directed test scripts

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Abstract
Since manual black-box testing of GUI-based applications (GAPs) is tedious and laborious, test engineers create test scripts to automate the testing process. These test scripts interact with GAPs by performing actions on their GUI objects. An extra effort that test engineers put in writing test scripts is paid off when these scripts are run repeatedly. Unfortunately, releasing new versions of GAPs with modified GUIs breaks their corresponding test scripts thereby obliterating benefits of test automation. We offer a novel approach for maintaining and evolving test scripts so that they can test new versions of their respective GAPs. We built a tool to implement our approach, and we conducted a case study with forty five professional programmers and test engineers to evaluate this tool. The results show with strong statistical significance that users find more failures and report fewer false positives (p < 0.02) in test scripts with our tool than with a flagship industry product and a baseline manual approach. Our tool is lightweight and it takes less than eight seconds to analyze approximately 1KLOC of test scripts.

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