Efficient GUI Test Generation by Learning from Tests of Other Apps

Summary

Generating GUI tests for complex Web applications is hard. There is lots of functionality to explore: The eBay home page, for instance, sports more than 2,000 individual GUI elements that a crawler has to trigger in order to discover the core functionality. We show how to leverage tests of other applications to guide test generation for a new application: Given a test for payments on Amazon, for instance, we can guide test generation on eBay towards payment functionality, exploiting the semantic similarity between UI elements across both applications. Evaluated on three domains, our approach allows to discover “deep” functionality in a few steps, which otherwise would require thousands to millions of crawling interactions.