Insights from Building a GUI Testing Tool

Testing the graphical user interface (GUI) of a system is an important part of quality assurance and to ensure end-user satisfaction. Despite numerous techniques for automated GUI testing having been proposed, there are still many open challenges for applying them in industry. In this paper, we present a GUI testing tool that we applied in industry to automate the testing of the GUI of manufacturing machinery. Our framework provides an interface to interact with Java AWT GUI components and to determine the current state of the GUI. This interface can be used by automated test scripts that are executed in nightly build at our industry partner. Moreover, we developed a GUI tool that communicates with the interface to run automated random robustness tests. We discuss the application of our tool at our industry partner and reflect on the lessons learned from it.