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The widespread use of GUIs for interacting with soft-ware is leading to the construction of more and more complex GUIs. With the growing complexity comes challenges in testing the correctness of a GUI and the underlying software. We present a new technique to au-tomatically generate test cases for GUIs that exploits planning, a well developed and used technique in ar-tificial intelligence. Given a set of operators, an initial state and a goal state, a planner produces a sequence of the operators that will change the initial state to the goal state. Our test case generation technique first ana-lyzes a GUI and derives hierarchical planning operators from the actions in the GUI. The test designer deter-mines the preconditions and effects of the hierarchical operators, which are then input into a planning system. With the knowledge of the GUI and the way in which the user will interact with the GUI, the test designer creates sets of initial and goal states. Given these ini-tial and final states of the GUI, a hierarchical planner produces plans, or a set of test cases, that enable the goal state to be reached. Our technique has the ad-ditional benefit of putting verification commands into the test cases automatically. We implemented our tech-nique by developing the GUI analyzer and extending a planner. We generated test cases for Microsoft’s Word-Pad to demonstrate the viability and practicality of the approach.
Memon et al. (Sun,) studied this question.