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

Direct experimental test of scalar confinement

The concept of Lorentz scalar quark confinement has a long history and is still widely used despite its well-known theoretical faults. We point out here that the predictions of scalar confinement also conflict directly with experiment. We investigate the dependence of heavy-light meson mass differences on the mass of the light quark. In particular, we examine the strange and non-strange D mesons. We find that the predictions of scalar confinement are in considerable conflict with measured values.Comment: REVTeX4, 7 pages, 4 EPS figure

Deep Sequencing of the Oral Microbiome Reveals Signatures of Periodontal Disease

The oral microbiome, the complex ecosystem of microbes inhabiting the human mouth, harbors several thousands of bacterial types. The proliferation of pathogenic bacteria within the mouth gives rise to periodontitis, an inflammatory disease known to also constitute a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. While much is known about individual species associated with pathogenesis, the system-level mechanisms underlying the transition from health to disease are still poorly understood. Through the sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene and of whole community DNA we provide a glimpse at the global genetic, metabolic, and ecological changes associated with periodontitis in 15 subgingival plaque samples, four from each of two periodontitis patients, and the remaining samples from three healthy individuals. We also demonstrate the power of whole-metagenome sequencing approaches in characterizing the genomes of key players in the oral microbiome, including an unculturable TM7 organism. We reveal the disease microbiome to be enriched in virulence factors, and adapted to a parasitic lifestyle that takes advantage of the disrupted host homeostasis. Furthermore, diseased samples share a common structure that was not found in completely healthy samples, suggesting that the disease state may occupy a narrow region within the space of possible configurations of the oral microbiome. Our pilot study demonstrates the power of high-throughput sequencing as a tool for understanding the role of the oral microbiome in periodontal disease. Despite a modest level of sequencing (∼2 lanes Illumina 76 bp PE) and high human DNA contamination (up to ∼90%) we were able to partially reconstruct several oral microbes and to preliminarily characterize some systems-level differences between the healthy and diseased oral microbiomes

Enhancing exploratory testing with rule-based verification

Bibliography: p. 104-11

Enhancing Exploratory Testing with Rule-Based Verification

Ye

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

Abstract. This paper presents a technique for test-driven development of GUIbased applications, as well as a pilot evaluation. In our approach, user interface prototypes are created in such a way as to allow capture/replay tools to record interactions with them. These recordings can then be replayed on the actual GUI as it is being developed in a test-driven fashion. The pilot evaluation found that developers integrated GUI tests, based on user interface prototypes, into their development process and used them as a way to determine when a feature is actually complete. Study participants felt that TDD of GUI based applications is useful

Test-Driven Development of Graphical User Interfaces: A Pilot Evaluation

This paper presents a technique for test-driven development of GUI based applications, as well as a pilot evaluation. In our approach, user interface prototypes are created in such a way as to allow capture/replay tools to record interactions with them. These recordings can then be replayed on the actual GUI as it is being developed in a test-driven fashion. The pilot evaluation found that developers integrated GUI tests, based on user interface prototypes,into their development process and used them as a way to determine when a feature is actually complete.Study participants felt that TDD of GUI based applications is useful.Ye

Agile Interaction Design and Test-Driven Development of User Interfaces – A Literature Review

This chapter describes the development of GUI-based applications, from usability engineering and prototyping to acceptance test-driven development, in an agile context. An overview of current agile interaction design practices will be presented, including a thorough analysis of the current role of prototyping and current attempts to facilitate test-driven development of GUI systems, as presented in academic and industrial literature. Traditional usability engineering approaches shows that if user input is taken into consideration early in the development process by repeatedly conducting usability tests on low-fidelity prototypes of the GUI system, the final version of the GUI will be both more usable and less likely to require revision. The major risk associated with test-driven development of GUIs is the high likelihood of change in the target GUI, which can make test development unnecessarily expensive and time consuming. A unification of these styles of development will be presented, along with a prediction of how this process can be used to simplify creating testable GUI-based applications by agile teams.Ye

Towards A Usable API for Constructing Interactive Multi-Surface Systems

Research into multi-surface systems goes back for more than thirty years, yet these systems have not been taken up in realworld settings. We believe the reason for the lack of adoption is that constructing multi-surface systems is costly and requires specialist knowledge of tasks related to device discovery, crossplatform interoperability, networking, and spatial tracking. These tasks represent a significant distraction from implementing features that actually matter to end users. While some APIs exist for supporting the set-up of multi-surface systems, they are directed at specialist developers. We propose to develop a highly learnable API for constructing multi-surface systems, which is targeted at non-specialists