The Introduction of Several User Interface Structural Metrics to Make Test Automation More Effective

Abstract

User interfaces have special characteristics that differentiate them from the rest of the software code. Typical software metrics that indicate its complexity and quality may not be able to distinguish a complex Graphical User Inter- face (GUI) or a high quality one from another that is not. This paper is about suggesting and introducing some GUI struc- tural metrics that can be gathered dynamically using a test automation tool. Rather than measuring quality or usability, the goal of those developed metrics is to measure the GUI testability, or how much it is hard, or easy to test a particular user interface. We evaluate GUIs for several reasons such as usability and testability. In usability, users evaluate a particular user interface for how much easy, convenient, and fast it is to deal with it. In our testability evaluation, we want to auto- mate the process of measuring the complexity of the user interface from testing perspectives. Such metrics can be used as a tool to estimate required resources to test a particular application.