Black-Box Test Data Generation for GUI Testing

Effective system testing of applications with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) front-end demands careful generation of event sequences as well as providing relevant test data for parameterized widgets, i.e., widgets that accept input values such as textboxes and textareas. Current GUI testing techniques either manipulate the source code of the application under test (AUT) to generate the test data, or blindly use a set of random string values. In this paper, we propose a third novel way to generate relevant test data for GUI testing. We exploit the information provided in the GUI structure to extract a set of key identifiers for each parameterized widget. These identifiers are used to compose appropriate search phrases and collect relevant test data from the Internet. The results of an empirical study on five GUI-based applications show that the proposed approach is applicable and can get some hard-to-cover branches in the subject programs to execute. The proposed technique works from the black-box perspective and is entirely independent from GUI modeling and event sequence generation, thus it does not need access to the source code of AUT and provides an opportunity to be integrated with the existing GUI testing frameworks.