TESTAR: tool support for test automation at the user interface level

Abstract

Testing applications with a graphical user interface (GUI) is an important, though challenging and time consuming task. The state of the art in the industry are still capture and replay tools, which may simplify the recording and execution of input sequences, but do not support the tester in finding fault-sensitive test cases and leads to a huge overhead on maintenance of the test cases when the GUI changes. In earlier works we presented the TES- TAR Tool, an automated approach to testing applications at the GUI level whose objective is to solve part of the maintenance problem by automatically generating test cases based on a structure that is automatically derived from the GUI. In this paper we report on our experiences obtained when implant- ing the Rogue User testing Tool with the Spanish software vendor Clavei who decided to apply the tool to stress test a component of one of their ERP applications. Our main goal was to identify potential problems that arise during the setup of the Rogue User. While carrying out our tests, we discovered critical and previously unknown faults in the application under test.