Reverse Engineered Formal Models for GUI Testing

This paper describes a process to reverse engineer structural and behaviouralformal models of a GUI application by a dynamic technique, mixingmanual with automatic exploration. The goal is to diminish the effort requiredto construct the model and mapping information needed in a model-based GUItesting process. A skeleton of a state machine model of the GUI, represented ina formal pre/post specification language, is generated automatically by the explorationprocess. Mapping information between the model and the implementationis also generated along the way. The model extracted automatically isthen completed manually in order to get an executable model which can be usedas a test oracle. Abstract test cases, including expected outputs, can be generatedautomatically from the final model and executed over the GUI application,using the mapping information generated during the exploration process.