Deployable Capture/Replay Supported by Internal Messages

Abstract

End-user software systems are usually operated using a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Therefore, the quality of the GUI greatly impacts the quality of use of a software, which makes GUI testing an important part of software quality assurance. Furthermore, bugs in the software are triggered by the users through interaction with the software's GUI. Thus, reliable usage information is required to replicate bugs, which is the first important step toward bug fixing. To support both GUI testing and bug reporting, we propose a GUI execution capturing technique that can be integrated into and deployed with software products. Our capturing technique not only captures user actions but also the internal communication between GUI objects. The captured internal communication allows further analysis of the software for debugging. Additionally, we propose a replaying mechanism based on the captures. The replay utilizes the internal communication to abstract from screen coordinates. The feasibility of both techniques is demonstrated through proof-of-concept implementations. In a case study, we applied our techniques to three software projects and evaluated the capabilities of both the approaches. We show that the integration of the capturing has no significant effort, and the whole methodology is mature enough to be integrated into the nightly test cycle of an industrial software project.