An event interaction structure for GUI test case generation

Graphical user interface (GUI) has become an important part of current software. But it is difficult for conventional test methods to test GUI due to the large number of states and the complexity among the events interaction. This paper presents an event interaction structure to model GUI and an algorithm to generate GUI interactive test cases. In this structure, the interaction relationships among events focus on the sharing variables or data or exchange messages of the event-handlers. Then the GUI interactive test cases are generated by analyzing the reading or writing operations of events or sending and receiving messages between events. Experiment shows that, under the condition of assuring event-based coverage rate, the number of effective GUI interactive test cases generated by our method is about 10 percent of the number of test cases generated by permutation and combination method.