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，因此确保其质量非常重要。在用于评估和改进软件质量的各种技术中，测试是目前使用最多的。不幸的是，编写测试是一项乏味且耗时的任务，通常是手动执行的，并且对于每个新开发的应用程序都是从头开始。事实上，尽管在现代软件工程中重用代码是一种常见的做法，但测试重用却大多被忽视了。测试可以极大地受益于这样一个事实：许多软件应用程序共享功能，并且许多这些应用程序的测试用例随时可用，尽管需要进行调整以转移到不同的测试场景。为了挖掘这个潜力，这个项目通过启用测试转移来推进软件测试：在至少共享部分功能的系统之间自动重用用户界面（UI）测试。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模块化框架，可以扩展到支持其他类型的软件。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概念上相似的UI元素，测试转移旨在使测试输入能够重用，否则很难自动生成。其次，通过迁移为相似特性编写的测试，测试转移旨在生成针对有意义用例的测试。第三，测试转移的目的是产生具有复杂预知性的测试，也就是说，检查测试结果，将其与大多数先前只关注崩溃的自动化测试技术区分开来。项目中开发的技术、工具和数据集正在向公众开放，以造福社区。项目的研究结果也被纳入参与机构的校内和在线课程。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.