Collaborative Research: SHF: Medium: A General Framework for Automated Test Transfer

About This Grant

Because software is increasingly prevalent in day-to-day life, it is extremely important to ensure its quality. Among the various techniques used to assess and improve the quality of software, testing is by far the most used. Unfortunately, writing tests is a tedious and time-consuming task that is often performed manually and mostly from scratch for every new application developed. In fact, whereas it is common practice to reuse code in modern software engineering, test reuse has been mostly neglected. Testing could greatly benefit from the fact that many software applications share functionality, and test cases for many of these applications are readily available, although in need of adaptation to be transferred to different test scenarios. To tap into this potential, this project is advancing software testing by enabling test transfer: automated reuse of User Interface (UI) tests across systems that share at least part of their functionality. While the initial focus of the project is on mobile and web applications, its ultimate goal is to develop a modular framework that can be extended to support additional types of software. This project promises to advance automated testing on multiple fronts. First, by employing various analysis techniques to identify conceptually similar UI elements across apps, test transfer is intended to enable the reuse of test inputs that are otherwise difficult to produce automatically. Second, by migrating tests written for similar features, test transfer is intended to produce tests that target meaningful use cases. Third, test transfer is intended to produce tests with sophisticated oracles, that is, checks of test outcomes, distinguishing it from most prior automated testing techniques that only focus on crashes. The techniques, tools, and datasets developed within the project are being made openly available to the public to benefit the community. The project findings are also being integrated into the on-campus and online curricula of the participating institutions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.