This month I have two left-field articles to discuss. One is a very technical paper and the other is from an ACM Web-based publication called Ubiquity. The first article introduces a technique to derive a GUI model for automated testing. It is a very well written paper published in the highly influential ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodologies. As the authors highlighted in the synopsis, this article "attempts to systematically generate potentially problematic sequences by empirically understanding event sequences that lead lead to successful fault detection". After I read this article, I wondered if the authors had considered disabled users and what would have been the generated problematic sequences? Would they be different? Would they identify more problematic sequences?

The second article, entitled as titled as "Why Does Time Go Faster As We Get Older?", is not as technically rich as the first article. I have been thinking about this question for a while and I thought other SIGACCESS members might also feel the same way and would be interested to read this short note.

Using a pilot study to derive a GUI model for automated testing

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are one of the most commonly used parts of today's software. Despite their ubiquity, testing GUIs for functional correctness remains an understudied area. A typical GUI gives many degrees of freedom to an end-user, leading to an enormous input event interaction space that needs to be tested. GUI test designers generate and execute test cases (modeled as sequences of user events) to traverse its parts; targeting a subspace in order to maximize fault detection is a nontrivial task. In this vein, in previous work, we used informal GUI code examination and personal intuition to develop an event-interaction graph (EIG). In this article we empirically derive the EIG model via a pilot study, and the resulting EIG validates our intuition used in previous work; the empirical derivation process also allows for model evolution as our understanding of GUI faults improves. Results of the pilot study show that events interact in complex ways; a GUI's response to an event may vary depending on the context established by preceding events and their execution order. The EIG model helps testers to understand the nature of interactions between GUI events when executed in test cases and why certain events detect faults, so that they can better traverse the event space. New test adequacy criteria are defined for the EIG; new algorithms use these criteria and EIG to systematically generate test cases that are shown to be effective on four fielded open-source applications.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1416563.1416567
Full Proceedings: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 18, Issue 2, 2008.
Why Does Time Go Faster As We Get Older?

...Finally, I decided to sit quietly and ponder the matter myself. This turned about to be a wise decision, because I think I found the solution. It's really quite simple. It all has to do with "anticipation" and "retrospection"...

Full Proceedings: Volume 9, Issue 39 (October 28 - November 3, 2008).

Labels: automated testing, Software engineering, ubiquity