What you see is what you test : a testing methodology for form-based visual programs

Visual programming languages employ visual representation to make programming easier and make programs more reliable and more accessible. Visual program testing becomes increasingly important as more and more visual programming languages and visual programming environments come into real use. In this work, we focus on one important class of visual programming languages: form-based visual programming languages. This class of languages includes electronic spreadsheets and a variety of research systems that have had a substantial impact on end-user computing. Research shows that form-based visual programs often contain faults, but that their creators often have unwarranted confidence in the reliability of their programs. Despite this evidence, we find no discussion in the research literature of techniques for testing or assessing the reliability of form-based visual programs. This lack will hinder the real use of visual programming languages. Our work addresses the lack of testing methodologies for form-based visual programs. In this document, we first examine differences between the form-based and imperative programming paradigms, discuss effects these differences have on methodologies for testing form-based programs, and analyze challenges and opportunities for form-based program testing. We then present several criteria for measuring test adequacy for form-based programs, and illustrate their application. We show that an analogue to the traditional "all-uses" dataflow test adequacy criterion is well suited for testing form-based visual programs: it provides important error-detection ability, and can be applied more easily to form-based programs than to imperative programs. Finally, we present a testing methodology that we have developed for form-based visual programs. To accommodate the evaluation model used with these programs, and the interactive process by which they are created, our methodology is validation-driven and incremental. To accommodate the user base of these languages, we provide an interface to the methodology that does not require an understanding of testing theory. We discuss our implementation of this methodology, its time costs, the mapping from our approach to the user interface, and empirical results achieved in its use

Interactive and Live Program Construction

In the highly technological and advanced society we live nowadays, it is essential to explore new development approaches in order to increase the efficiency and flexibility with which software is built. Our work focuses on the design and conception of a live graphical environment to allow for incremental and interactive construction of web applications through visual manipulation interactions. Our research is introduced in the context of a prototype, Live Programming, that provides a style of incremental and agile development of web applications, allowing for efficient updates of code and data. However, the construction of a web application through the existing coding environment is still slow and not as flexible as one would wish. This is due to the fact that its user interface is based on text editors, resulting in a heavy reliance on computer code to build these applications. The goal of our work consists on the conception of a visual construction model and graphical environment that interacts with the Live Programming system, allowing to incrementally develop web applications through the manipulation of visual symbols on the screen. The user does not need to program: instead, our tool automatically generates code according to the user’s manipulation of the visual components. The user must then be able to visually define the data model, queries, logical operations and presentation views (for example, html pages). We aim, as well, at idealizing and proposing creative and convenient techniques to program visualization and methods to visually organize the structure of a program, in order to help the user comprehending the relationships between elements and their responsibility within the system. This way, developers leverage an agile and interactive approach to efficiently deal with increasingly demanding requirements throughout development

Abmash: Mashing Up Legacy Web Applications by Automated Imitation of Human Actions

Many business web-based applications do not offer applications programming interfaces (APIs) to enable other applications to access their data and functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult (for instance to synchronize data between two applications). To address this challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the integration of such legacy web applications by automatically imitating human interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) of web applications, the system supports all forms of integrations including bi-directional interactions and is able to interact with AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to write since they deal with end-user, visual user-interface elements. The integration code is simple enough to be called a "mashup".Comment: Software: Practice and Experience (2013)

Leachate treatment by conventional coagulation, electrocoagulation and two-stage coagulation (conventional coagulation and electrocoagulation)

Leachate is widely explored and investigated due to highly polluted and difficult to treat. Leachate treatment commonly involves advanced, complicated and high cost activities. Conventional coagulation is widely used in the treatment of wastewater but the sludge production becomes the biggest constraint in this treatment. Electrocoagulation is an alternative to conventional method because it has the same application but produce less sludge and requires simple equipment. Thus, combination of conventional coagulation and electrocoagulation can improve the efficiency of coagulation process in leachate treatment. This article is focusing on the efficiency of single and combined treatment as well as the improvement made by combined treatment. Based on review, the percentage reduction of current density and dose of coagulant was perceptible. As much 50% reduction of current density, duration of treatment, and dose of coagulant able to be obtained by using combined treatment. This combined treatment is able to reduce the cost and at the same time reduce the duration of treatment. Hence, the combined treatment offers an alternative technique for landfill leachate treatment on the removal of pollutants

Creating Interaction Scenarios With a New Graphical User Interface

The field of human-centered computing has known a major progress these past few years. It is admitted that this field is multidisciplinary and that the human is the core of the system. It shows two matters of concern: multidisciplinary and human. The first one reveals that each discipline plays an important role in the global research and that the collaboration between everyone is needed. The second one explains that a growing number of researches aims at making the human commitment degree increase by giving him/her a decisive role in the human-machine interaction. This paper focuses on these both concerns and presents MICE (Machines Interaction Control in their Environment) which is a system where the human is the one who makes the decisions to manage the interaction with the machines. In an ambient context, the human can decide of objects actions by creating interaction scenarios with a new visual programming language: scenL.Comment: 5th International Workshop on Intelligent Interfaces for Human-Computer Interaction, Palerme : Italy (2012