JETracer - A Framework for Java GUI Event Tracing

The present paper introduces the open-source Java Event Tracer (JETracer) framework for real-time tracing of GUI events within applications based on the AWT, Swing or SWT graphical toolkits. Our framework provides a common event model for supported toolkits, the possibility of receiving GUI events in real-time, good performance in the case of complex target applications and the possibility of deployment over a network. The present paper provides the rationale for JETracer, presents related research and details its technical implementation. An empirical evaluation where JETracer is used to trace GUI events within five popular, open-source applications is also presented.Comment: Proceedings of ENASE 2015, ISBN: 978-989-758-100-

Automated GUI performance testing

A significant body of prior work has devised approaches for automating the functional testing of interactive applications. However, little work exists for automatically testing their performance. Performance testing imposes additional requirements upon GUI test automation tools: the tools have to be able to replay complex interactive sessions, and they have to avoid perturbing the application's performance. We study the feasibility of using five Java GUI capture and replay tools for GUI performance test automation. Besides confirming the severity of the previously known GUI element identification problem, we also describe a related problem, the temporal synchronization problem, which is of increasing importance for GUI applications that use timer-driven activity. We find that most of the tools we study have severe limitations when used for recording and replaying realistic sessions of real-world Java applications and that all of them suffer from the temporal synchronization problem. However, we find that the most reliable tool, Pounder, causes only limited perturbation and thus can be used to automate performance testing. Based on an investigation of Pounder's approach, we further improve its robustness and reduce its perturbation. Finally, we demonstrate in a set of case studies that the conclusions about perceptible performance drawn from manual tests still hold when using automated tests driven by Pounder. Besides the significance of our findings to GUI performance testing, the results are also relevant to capture and replay-based functional GUI test automation approache

Supporting Test-Driven Development of Graphical User Interfaces Using Agile Interaction Design

Abstract — Test-driven development of GUIs is currently very difficult. On the one hand, to avoid frequent updates of the tests, test-driven development requires a degree of stability in the application under development, whereas GUIs are very likely to change during development. On the other hand, the easiest way of creating GUI tests – using a capture/replay tool – requires the GUI to exist. This paper introduces a new approach to user-interface test-driven development, wherein a capture-replay tool is used to record test scripts from low-fidelity prototypes. This allows GUI tests to be written simply and without requiring that the GUI exist first

Test-Driven Development as an Innovation Value Chain

For all companies that consider their Information Technology Department to be of strategic value, it is important to incorporate an innovation value chain into their software development lifecycles to enhance their teams' performance. One model is TDD (Test-Driven Development), which is a process that detects failures and improves the productivity and quality of the team’s work. Data were collected from a Financial Company with 3,500 employees to demonstrate that software projects that require more than 4,000 hours of development benefit from TDD if a clear knowledge conversion step occurs between the client and the developers

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