Specification-driven automated testing of java swing GUIs using XML

A common method for GUI testing is the capture and replay (CR) technique. While commonly used this technique can not be used until an application under test (AUT) is completely developed. In this paper we propose a specification-driven approach to test GUI-Based Java programs as an alternative to the CR technique. We introduce a GUI-event test specification language based on XML from which an automated test engine is generated. The popularity of XML as a scripting language, its ease of use and its standard format have made writing a test script using our proposed specification language an easy task. Beside the ability to test AUT before being completely developed we have implemented a visual editor that can generate the test specification file for an already existing AUT. The engine generates GUI events and captures event responses to automatically verify the results of the test cases which are written to a test log file. This approach supports N-version testing, where each version of the application is intended to satisfy the same specification.