Creating GUI Testing Tools Using Accessibility Technologies

Since manual black-box testing of GUI-based applications(GAPs) is tedious and laborious, and existing tools do not fully address different aspects of the testing process, test engineers create custom testing tools to automate the testing process. These tools interact with GAPs by performing actions on their GUI objects. An extra effort that test engineers put in writing test tools is paid off when these tools are run repeatedly on different GAPs. Unfortunately, creating custom GUI testing tools is a laborious and intellectually intensive process, during which test engineers use platform-specific libraries and techniques. As a result, these tools are expensive, difficult to maintain and evolve, and they often run only on specific platforms.We offer a universal approach for creating custom testing GUI tools. This approach is lightweight, portable, nonintrusive, universal, and cheap, and it combines a nonstandard use of accessibility technologies for accessing and controlling GAPs in a uniform way with a visualization mechanism that enables test personnel to interact with GUI objects by performing point-and-click, drag-and-drop operations on GAPs. We describe how we used this approach to create various GUI testing tools, delve into technical features of accessibility technologies, and review our experience with this approach.