Incorporating a contract-based test facility to the GUI framework

The graphical user interface (GUI) is one of the key components in interactive software systems. In most cases, developing such a system requires significant cost and effort. To reduce the cost and improve the software quality, many GUI frameworks have been proposed. However, these GUI frameworks lack built-in test facilities. To address these issues, the paper proposes a novel approach to incorporating a contract-based test facility in the GUI framework by adding the test facility to the underlying OO (object-oriented) framework. Unlike traditional source code modification techniques, this approach adopts the architectural structure to implement the contracts, promotes the reuse of the test facility itself and can be applied to the commercial off-the-shelf GUI framework, where the source codes are not available, to increase its testability.