Supporting Test-Driven Development of Graphical User Interfaces Using Agile Interaction Design

Test-driven development of GUIs is currently very difficult. On the one hand, to avoid frequent updates of the tests, test-driven development requires a degree of stability in the application under development, whereas GUIs are very likely to change during development. On the other hand, the easiest way of creating GUI tests - using a capture/replay tool - requires the GUI to exist. This paper introduces a new approach to user-interface test-driven development, wherein a capture-replay tool is used to record test scripts from low-fidelity prototypes. This allows GUI tests to be written simply and without requiring that the GUI exist first.