An Extensible Heuristic-Based Framework for GUI Test Case Maintenance

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) make up a large portion of the code comprising many modern software applications.  However, GUI testing differs significantly from testing of traditional software.  One respect in which this is true is test case maintenance.  Due to the way that GUI test cases are often implemented, relatively minor changes to the construction of the GUI can cause a large number of test case executions to malfunction, often because GUI elements referred to by the test cases have been renamed, moved, or otherwise altered.  We posit that a general solution to the problem of GUI test case maintenance must be based on heuristics that attempt to match an application’s GUI elements across versions.  We demonstrate the use of some heuristics with framework support. Our tool support is general in that it may be used with other heuristics if needed in the future.