Specification-based testing of interactive systems

Interactive Systems. Design, …, 2003

It is proposed an approach to integrate formal methods in the software development process, with an emphasis on the user interface development. The approach covers the specification by means of formal models, early model animation and validation, construction and conformity testing of the user interface implementation with respect to the specification. These conformity tests are described in detail through a state transition model with an abstraction function mapping concrete (implementation) to abstract (specification) states and operations. In order to illustrate the approach, it is presented a simple login/password dialog specification in VDM++, using a reusable control specification library, with a straightforward translation to Java or C#.

1999

Interactive systems can be analysed and developed in terms of functionality, presentation and behaviour. In this paper we demonstrate how testing information for interactive systems can be derived from formal speci cations of these aspects. The paper uses the Multi-modal Airline Travel Information System (MATIS) speci cation of Duke and Harrison. Their speci cation considers these aspects separately using both Z and CSP. Di erences between the aspects, supported by the di ering notations, carry through into the testing information we derive. This demonstrates that partial or viewpoint speci cations of interactive systems are useful for test derivation. This work is a step towards our goal of developing a framework for speci cation-based testing of interactive systems.

SIGCHI bulletin, 1996

At CHI '95 a workshop was held on the formal specification of user interfaces. Eighteen people attended based on submitted position papers from the United States, Canada, Europe, and New Zealand. Participants had a wide range of backgrounds from academia, industry, and government. This report summarizes the motivation behind the workshop, the interests/research areas of the participants, and the issues that arose in discussions.

Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Software Engineering, 1998

ausbourg,seguin,durrieu,ABSTRACT This paper describes the prototype of a software environment that was devised for helping the formal validation of user interfaces systems. The paper suggests an approach to include such formal operations in the design process. An abstract and formal representation of the user interface system is produced to perform formal verifications on it.The paper explains why the user interface system can be modelled properly by a dataflow system and how this model can be expressed by using equations of flows in the language Lustre. It describes then some main tools of the environment

2003

Our work focuses on the use of formal techniques in order to increase the quality of HCI software and of all the processes resulting from the development, verification, design and validation activities. This paper shows how the B formal technique can be used for user tasks modelling and validation. A trace based semantics is used to describe either the HCI or the user tasks. Each task is modelled by a sequence of fired events. Each event is defined in the abstract specification and design of the HCI system.

Analytic usability analysis methods have been proposed as an alternative to user testing in early phases of development due to the cost of the latter approach. By working with models of the systems, analytic models are not capable of identifying implementation related problems that might have an impact on usability. Model-based testing enables the testing of an implemented software artefact against a model of what it should be (the oracle). In the case of model-based user interface testing, the models should be expressed at an adequate level of abstraction, adequately modelling the interaction process. This paper describes an effort to develop tool support enabling the use of task models as oracles for model-based testing of user interfaces.

Eurographics, 1995

In this paper we investigate a component-based approach to combining formal techniques and prototyping for user interface construction in which a single speci cation is used for constructing both implementations (prototypes) for experimentation and models for formal reasoning. Using a component-based approach not only allows us to construct realistic prototypes, but also allows us to generate a variety of formal models. Rapid prototyping allows the designs to be tested with end users and modi ed based on their comments and performance, while formal modeling permits the designer to verify mechanically speci c requirements imposed on the user interface such as those found in safety-or security-critical applications.

Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems, 2016

Ensuring the effectiveness factor of usability consists in ensuring that the application allows users to reach their goals and perform their tasks. One of the few means for reaching this goal relies on task analysis and proving the compatibility between the interactive application and its task models. Synergistic execution enables the validation of a system against its task model by co-executing the system and the task model and comparing the behavior of the system against what is prescribed in the model. This allows a tester to explore scenarios in order to detect deviations between the two behaviors. Manual exploration of scenarios does not guarantee a good coverage of the analysis. To address this, we resort to model-based testing (MBT) techniques to automatically generate scenarios for automated synergistic execution. To achieve this, we generate, from the task model, scenarios to be co-executed over the task model and the system. During this generation step we explore the possibility of including considerations about user error in the analysis. The automation of the execution of the scenarios closes the process. We illustrate the approach with an example.

2004

This paper addresses our experience in using and developing the VEG (Visual Event Grammars) toolkit for the formal specification, verification, design and implementation of graphical user interfaces. In fact, VEG follows the traditional Seeheim's model, decomposing a GUI in three parts. The Presentation Part takes into account how the different components of the GUI are depicted and laid out (eg, colors, borders, sizes and locations); in VEG this is delegated to an external presentation design toolkit.

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 2011

GUI testing is currently one of the most expensive and time consuming processes in the software life-cycle and according to some estimates this cost can reach up to 50 to 70% of the whole cost of the project. This paper proposes a framework for specification-based automated GUI testing which employs a GUI analyzer for dynamic analysis and extraction of GUI object information, a system for automatic test case generation driven by Spec#, a test-case execution algorithm that executes test-cases automatically and a verifier that compares the expected with the actual result of the test. Preliminary experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the framework.