Browsing by Author "Hellmann, Theodore"

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    Automated GUI Testing for Agile Development Environments
    (2015-04-24) Hellmann, Theodore; Maurer, Frank
    For as long as graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have existed, it has been difficult to test them. This difficulty has become more pressing with the advent of Agile development methodologies, which stress that software should be fully tested to demonstrate that it works from developers’ and users’ points of view. In this thesis, I explored the fundamental question of whether automated GUI testing and Agile development environments are, or can be made, compatible. I conducted systematic mapping studies to determine how GUI testing and agile are currently compatible in existing literature, and performed an interview study with practitioners in order to determine how well these results matched up with what is done in industry. Based on the results of these studies, I confirmed that test-driven development (TDD) was a major area where automated GUI tests could fit into an agile process. I proposed a novel approach to TDD of GUIs that leverages Agile User Interaction Design techniques: by using an interactive low-fidelity prototype – already part of many Agile development processes – as the basis for automated GUI tests, TDD can be performed on a GUI with minimal added effort. A controlled experiment was used to validate this approach with practitioners, and the results indicated that this approach would be useful in practice.
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    An Exploratory Study of Automated GUI Testing: Goals, Issues, and Best Practices
    (2014-04-11) Hellmann, Theodore; Moazzen, Elham; Sharma, Abhishek; Akbar, Md. Zabedul; Sillito, Jonathan; Maurer, Frank
    Manually testing GUIs can be expensive and complex, so the creation of automated GUI test suites has been an area of significant interest. However, to our knowledge, the motivations of testers and the problems they encounter when attempting to create and use automated GUI tests have not been explored. We used Grounded Theory to investigate the goals motivating automated GUI testing, the issues testers encounter, and the best practices applied to overcome these issues. Through this study, we demonstrate that automated GUI test suite evolution and architecture are extremely important to the success of automated GUI testing and describe techniques that can be of use to practitioners. In addition to these best practices, this study identifies additional areas in which future research should be concentrated.