Exploring the underlying structure of a Human-Machine Interface (HMI) product effectively while adhering to the pre-defined test conditions and methodology is critical for validating the quality of the software. We propose an reinforcement-learning powered Automated Software Structure Exploration Framework for Testing (ASSET), which is capable of interacting with and analyzing the HMI software under testing (SUT). The main challenge is to incorporate the human instructions into the ASSET phase by using the visual feedback such as the downloaded image sequence from the HMI, which could be difficult to analyze. Our framework combines both computer vision and natural language processing techniques to understand the semantic meanings of the visual feedback. Building on the semantic understanding, we develop a rules-guided software exploration algorithm via reinforcement learning and deterministic finite automaton (DFA). We conducted experiments on HMI software in actual production phase and demonstrate that the exploration coverage and efficiency of our framework outperforms current start-of-art methods.

Discovering the underlying structure of HMI software efficiently and sufficiently for the purpose of testing without any prior knowledge on the software logic remains a difficult problem. The key challenge lies in the complexity of the HMI software and the high variance in the coverage of current methods. In this paper, we introduce the PathFinder, an effective and automatic HMI software exploration framework. PathFinder adopts a curiosity-based reinforcement learning framework to choose actions that lead to the discovery of more unknown states. Additionally, PathFinder progressively builds a navigation model during the exploration to further improve state coverage. We have conducted experiments on both simulations and real-world HMI software testing environment, which comprise a full tool chain of automobile dashboard instrument cluster. The exploration coverage outperforms manual and fuzzing methods which are the current industrial standards.