GUI Testing Made Easy

Despite its importance, testing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is frequently seen as a difficult activity. The challenges present in GUI testing may discourage developers and testers, to the point that they may eventually stop writing tests. This paper describes the common problems that make creation and maintenance of GUI tests complex. Our intention is to present a GUI testing strategy that includes writing robust GUI tests, creating testable GUIs and testing legacy/existing GUIs. Simultaneously, we discuss the features that a tool should offer to simplify GUI testing. We cover the intricacies that developers and testers face when writing, maintaining and troubleshooting GUI tests, and offer practical solutions to each of them.The ideas explained in this paper have been successfully implemented in the open source project FEST, a GUI testing library for Java Swing GUIs.