A Methodology and Framework for Automatic Layout Independent GUI Testing of Applications Developed in Magic xpa

摘要

Testing an application via its Graphical User Interface (GUI) requires lots of manual work, even if some steps of GUI testing can be automated. Test automation tools are great help for testers, particularly for regression testing. However these tools still lack some important features and still require manual work to maintain the test cases. For instance, if the layout of a window is changed without affecting the main functionality of the application, all test cases testing the window must be re-recorded again. This hard maintenance work is one of the greatest problems with the regression tests of GUI applications. In our paper we propose an approach to use the GUI information stored in the source code during automatic testing processes to create layout independent test scripts. The idea was motivated by testing an application developed in a fourth generation language, Magic. In this language the layout of the GUI elements (e.g. position and size of controls) are stored in the code and can be gathered via static code analysis. We implemented the presented approach for Magic xpa in a tool called Magic Test Automation, which is used by our industrial partner who has developed applications in Magic for more than a decade.