Test automation for Graphical User Interfaces: A review

Nowdays, as people´s dependence on the softwares increases, there exists a great chance for the software users to be exposed to many failures, which probably induced by users incorrect behaviors. In this situation, testing human interactions with the software is more difficult than testing the machine programs because we are not aware of the human interaction sequences. For example, a user may double click payment button twice and he is charged money twice; or a user may intend to press button of delete data before he inserts no data. Since GUI interaction depends on users, we are actually expecting infinite number of different input instances from the various interactions from the user. So, test automation process could help in this situation; so it can facilitate generating and running all those test cases in order to cover as most as we can of the various user interactions. Graphical User Interface (GUI) is the front-end of the software where the user interacts with software through it. This paper presents the classification of GUI test automation techniques, presenting the concepts of the techniques and supporting them with several illustrations. Also, some open source tools for test automation are presented as examples. Finally, I have presented a comparison for each of those test automation classifications and the open source tools, so that a reader can get benefit and distinguish between them.