SHF: Medium: Automated Graphical User Interface Testing with Learning

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Smartphones and tablets with rich graphical user interfaces (GUIs) arebecoming increasingly popular. Hundreds of thousands of specializedapplications, called apps, are already available for these mobileplatforms, and the number of newly released apps continues toincrease. The complexity of these apps lies often in the userinterface, with data processing either minor, or delegated to abackend component. A similar situation exists in applications usingthe software-as-a-service architecture, where the client-sidecomponent consists mostly of user interface code. Testing suchapplications predominantly involves GUI testing. Existing automatictechniques for testing these interfaces either require a priori modelsof the interface and are thus hard to use, or operate blindly bysending random user events to the application and are typically unableto test the application in satisfactory depth.This project investigates automatic GUI testing techniques thatsystematically explore the state space of an application withoutrequiring an a priori defined model. One insight behind this projectis that the automatic construction of a model of the user interfaceand the testing of the interface are tasks that can cooperate in amutually beneficial way. Furthermore, a guiding principle throughoutthis research is to design algorithms that operate with abstractionsand heuristics that are simple enough to be understood by humans whodo not necessarily understand the internals of the tested app. Suchalgorithms are easier to comprehend and to incorporate into awholistic test process that includes automated techniques, such as theones developed in this project, and manual testing and guidance. Thetechniques developed in this project benefit directly programmers forthese apps, and indirectly the numerous users of mobile and webapplications.