In this paper we propose an approach that, given a structured requirements specification, allows the automatic online detection of a redundant test case. This means that, at each time point during a testing phase, one automatically infers the failure of a test case from the current status of successful tests and failed tests. By a structured requirements specification we mean that one uses a hierarchical structure and types to document the (natural language) formulation of requirements. We have implemented the approach. The evaluation of our implementation in a case study in the context of the development process for Mercedes-Benz vehicles at Daimler AG indicates the practical potential of our approach.

A crucial problem in GUI testing is the identification of accurate event sequences that encode corresponding user interactions with the GUI. Ultimately, event sequences should be both feasible (i. e., executable on the GUI) and relevant (i.e., cover as much of the code as possible). So far, most work on GUI testing focused on approaches to generate feasible event sequences. In addition, based on event dependency analyses, a recently proposed static analysis approach systematically aims at selecting both relevant and feasible event sequences. However, statically analyzing event dependencies can cause the generation of a huge number of event sequences, leading to unmanageable GUI test suites that are not executable within reasonable time. In this paper we propose a refined static analysis approach based on program slicing. On the theoretical side, our approach identifies and eliminates redundant event sequences in GUI test suites. Redundant event sequences have the property that they are guaranteed to not affect the test effectiveness. On the practical side, we have implemented a slicing-based test suite reduction algorithm that approximatively identifies redundant event sequences. Our experiments on six open source GUI applications show that our reduction algorithm significantly reduces the size of GUI test suites. As a result, the overall execution time could significantly be reduced without losing test effectiveness.

GUI testing is an active research area. The open challenge is the judicious generation of event sequences (an event sequence encodes a user interaction). A major advance in this direction is the use of a black-box model to systematically generate event sequences that are executable on the GUI. The black-box model can be, e.g., an Event Flow Graph (EFG) or an Event Sequence Graph (ESG). In this paper we propose a new approach to select relevant event sequences among the event sequences generated by a black-box model. We express the relevance of an event sequence by a precisely defined dependency between a fixed number of events in the event sequence. Departing from a pure black-box approach we apply a static analysis to the byte code of the application. This allows us to infer a dependency graph, which we call Event Dependency Graph (EDG). We use the EDG together with a black-box model to construct a set of relevant event sequences among the executable ones. We have implemented our approach in a new tool. We evaluate the approach on four open source GUI applications. With the specific choice of a lightweight static analysis, the approach scales to large applications and, at the same time, leads to an informed selection of event sequences. Using our approach we are able to find previously undetected bugs.