Model-Based Testing of Community-Driven Open-Source GUI Applications

Although the World-Wide-Web (WWW) has significantly enhanced open-source software (OSS) development, it has also created new challenges for quality assurance (QA), especially for OSS with a graphical-user interface (GUI) front-end. Distributed communities of developers, connected by the WWW, work concurrently on loosely-coupled parts of the OSS and the corresponding GUI code. Due to the unprecedented code churn rates enabled by the WWW, developers may not have time to determine whether their recent modifications have caused integration problems with the overall OSS; these problems can often be detected via GUI integration testing. However, the resource-intensive nature of GUI testing prevents the application of existing automated QA techniques used during conventional OSS evolution. In this paper we develop new process support for three nested techniques that leverage developer communities interconnected by the WWW to automate model-based testing of evolving GUI-based OSS. The "innermost" technique (crash testing) operates on each code check-in of the GUI software and performs a quick and fully automatic integration test. The second technique {smoke testing) operates on each day's GUI build and performs functional "reference testing" of the newly integrated version of the GUI. The third (outermost) technique (comprehensive GUI testing) conducts detailed integration testing of a major GUI release. An empirical study involving four popular OSS shows that (1) the overall approach is useful to detect severe faults in GUI-based OSS and (2) the nesting paradigm helps to target feedback and makes effective use of the WWW by implicitly distributing QA