The generation of syntactically and semantically valid input data, able to exercise functionalities imposing constraints on the validity of the inputs, is a key challenge in automatic GUI (Graphical User Interface) testing. Existing test case generation techniques often rely on manually curated catalogs of values, although they might require significant effort to be created and maintained, and could hardly scale to applications with several input forms. Alternatively, it is possible to extract values from external data sources, such as the Web or publicly available knowledge bases. However, external sources are unlikely to provide the domain-specific and application-specific data that are often required to thoroughly exercise applications. This paper proposes DBInputs , a novel approach that automatically identifies domain-specific and application-specific inputs to effectively fulfill the validity constraints present in the tested GUI screens. The approach exploits syntactic and semantic similarities between the identifiers of the input fields shown on GUI screens and those of the tables of the target GUI application database, and extracts valid inputs from such database, automatically resolving the mismatch between the user interface and the database schema. DBInputs can properly cope with system testing and maintenance testing efforts, since databases are naturally and inexpensively available in those phases. Our experiments with 4 Web applications and 11 Mobile apps provide evidence that DBInputs can outperform techniques like random input selection and Link , a competing approach for searching inputs from knowledge bases, in both Web and Mobile domains.

中文翻译：

---

DBInputs：利用持久数据改进自动化 GUI 测试


生成语法和语义上有效的输入数据，能够执行对输入有效性施加约束的功能，是自动 GUI（图形用户界面）测试中的关键挑战。现有的测试用例生成技术通常依赖于手动管理的值目录，尽管它们可能需要大量的工作来创建和维护，并且很难扩展到具有多种输入形式的应用程序。或者，可以从外部数据源（例如 Web 或公开可用的知识库）提取值。然而，外部来源不太可能提供彻底执行应用程序通常所需的特定领域和特定应用程序的数据。本文提出了 DBInputs，这是一种自动识别特定于领域和特定于应用程序的输入的新颖方法，以有效满足测试的 GUI 屏幕中存在的有效性约束。该方法利用 GUI 屏幕上显示的输入字段的标识符与目标 GUI 应用程序数据库的表的标识符之间的语法和语义相似性，并从该数据库中提取有效输入，自动解决用户界面和数据库模式之间的不匹配问题。 DBInputs 可以正确应对系统测试和维护测试工作，因为数据库在这些阶段自然而然且廉价可用。我们对 4 个 Web 应用程序和 11 个移动应用程序进行的实验证明，DBInputs 的性能优于随机输入选择和 Link 等技术，Link 是一种在 Web 和移动领域从知识库搜索输入的竞争方法。