A Model-Driven Approach for Behavior-Driven GUI Testing

Behavior-driven development (BDD) brings requirement specifications and their test cases closer together by using a ubiquitous language to describe requirements that are automatically mapped to test methods. Although industry-proven tools support this automated requirement mapping, the test methods need to be implemented manually. The approach presented in this paper transforms BDD-like requirement specifications and low fidelity graphical user interface (GUI) descriptions in the format of wireframes into automatically executable graphical user interface test cases. The requirement descriptions are defined in a domain-specific language (DSL) that obeys the rules of the ubiquitous language enhanced by references to screens and widgets in a graphical user interface model. The paper reports on a controlled AB/BA crossover experiment comparing the efficiency of our approach to the industry-proven JBehave tooling. The results show that the introduced approach on average takes 63% less time to specify automated tests and thereby diminishes the problem of graphical user interface test cases being expensive to write. The experimental results were supported by experience made applying the approach in three differently sized components at a large Swiss bank.