Collaborative Research: SHF: Medium: A General Framework for Automated Test Transfer

由于软件在日常生活中越来越普遍，确保其质量是极其重要的。在用于评估和改进软件质量的各种技术中，测试是迄今为止使用最多的。不幸的是，编写测试是一项乏味和耗时的任务，通常是手动执行的，并且对于每个新开发的应用程序大多是从头开始执行的。事实上，尽管在现代软件工程中重用代码是一种常见的实践，但测试重用在很大程度上被忽略了。许多软件应用程序共享功能，测试可以从这一事实中获得极大的好处，其中许多应用程序的测试用例随时可用，尽管需要调整以转移到不同的测试场景。为了挖掘这一潜力，该项目正在通过启用测试转移来推进软件测试：跨系统自动重用用户界面(UI)测试，这些系统至少共享其部分功能。虽然该项目最初的重点是移动和Web应用程序，但其最终目标是开发一个可扩展以支持其他类型软件的模块化框架。该项目承诺在多个方面推进自动化测试。首先，通过使用各种分析技术来识别应用程序之间在概念上相似的UI元素，测试转移旨在实现测试输入的重用，否则很难自动生成测试输入。其次，通过迁移为类似功能编写的测试，测试转移旨在生成针对有意义用例的测试。第三，测试转移的目的是生成具有复杂先知的测试，即检查测试结果，这与大多数以前只关注崩溃的自动化测试技术不同。该项目开发的技术、工具和数据集正在向公众公开提供，以造福于社区。项目发现也被整合到参与机构的校园和在线课程中。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Because software is increasingly prevalent in day-to-day life, it is extremely important to ensure its quality. Among the various techniques used to assess and improve the quality of software, testing is by far the most used. Unfortunately, writing tests is a tedious and time-consuming task that is often performed manually and mostly from scratch for every new application developed. In fact, whereas it is common practice to reuse code in modern software engineering, test reuse has been mostly neglected. Testing could greatly benefit from the fact that many software applications share functionality, and test cases for many of these applications are readily available, although in need of adaptation to be transferred to different test scenarios.To tap into this potential, this project is advancing software testing by enabling test transfer: automated reuse of User Interface (UI) tests across systems that share at least part of their functionality. While the initial focus of the project is on mobile and web applications, its ultimate goal is to develop a modular framework that can be extended to support additional types of software. This project promises to advance automated testing on multiple fronts. First, by employing various analysis techniques to identify conceptually similar UI elements across apps, test transfer is intended to enable the reuse of test inputs that are otherwise difficult to produce automatically. Second, by migrating tests written for similar features, test transfer is intended to produce tests that target meaningful use cases. Third, test transfer is intended to produce tests with sophisticated oracles, that is, checks of test outcomes, distinguishing it from most prior automated testing techniques that only focus on crashes. The techniques, tools, and datasets developed within the project are being made openly available to the public to benefit the community. The project findings are also being integrated into the on-campus and online curricula of the participating institutions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.