Model-based contract testing of graphical user interfaces

Abstract

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are critical for the security, safety and reliability of software systems. Injection attacks, for instance via SQL, succeed due to insufficient input validation and can be avoided if contract-based approaches, such as Design by Contract, are followed in the software development lifecycle of GUIs. This paper proposes a model-based testing approach for detecting GUI data contract violations, which may result in serious failures such as system crash. A contract-based model of GUI data specifications is used to develop test scenarios and to serve as test oracle. The technique introduced uses multi terminal binary decision diagrams, which are designed as an integral part of decision tableaugmented event sequence graphs, to implement a GUI testing process. A case study, which validates the presented approach on a port scanner written in Java programming language, is presented. Copyright © 2015 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.