CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2013/ch1 1w32 av

Introduction

Graphical user interface testing is the process of testing a product's graphical user interface to ensure it meets its designed specifications.

GUI testing is difficult mainly due to following reasons :

• Large space of possibilities. Each sequence of GUI commands can result in various states. Evaluation of all these states is essential for validation of the GUI of the given software.
• Event-driven architecture. The test suite has to simulate the various user created actions.

Following are the challenges encountered while testing the graphical user interface of any software or system:

• Automation is difficult.
• The scope for testing is enormous
• Inability to determine the state of the program from GUI.
• Regression testing is difficult. Testcases may not be reusable

The current trend in user interfaces is geared towards graphical user interfaces (GUIs). This presents a problem for designing tests for software, since GUIs are very complex and hence GUI testing is very time consuming. Automation is a requirement for testing any larger graphical user interfaces, but automating GUI tests isn’t a straightforward task. Techniques which are familiar from the command line interface (CLI) age, don’t translate to the GUI world without problems.

Selenium

Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language (Selenium IDE). It also provides a test domain-specific language (Selenese) to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including Java, C#, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. The tests can then be run against most modern web browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms.