GUITAR: an innovative tool for automated testing of GUI-driven software

Most of today’s software applications feature a graphical user interface (GUI) front-end. System testing of these applications requires that test cases, modeled as sequences of GUI events, be generated and executed on the software. We term GUI testing as the process of testing a software application through its GUI. Researchers and practitioners agree that one must employ a variety of techniques (e.g., model-based, capture/replay, manually scripted) for effective GUI testing. Yet, the tools available today for GUI testing are limited in the techniques they support. In this paper, we describe an innovative tool called GUITAR that supports a wide variety of GUI testing techniques. The innovation lies in the architecture of GUITAR, which uses plug-ins to support flexibility and extensibility. Software developers and quality assurance engineers may use this architecture to create new toolchains, new workflows based on the toolchains, and plug in a variety of measurement tools to conduct GUI testing. We demonstrate these features of GUITAR via several carefully crafted case studies.