Automated software testing for high-end touch screen automotive displays

The Current Methodologies of virtual and Automated Testing on touch screen displays are limited, since, minor screen changes and display software updates will cause the automated tests to fail and hence there will be a need to fix them. Addition of new items to a drop-down list, movement of buttons, reusability and conversion of Test scripts for similar devices will be a cumbersome job. The general approach of testing Display manually, is not feasible due to sluggishness, monotony and repetitiveness of work, which can cause manual errors in different volumes at different times, it will also reduce the option of Batch executions of tests 24∗7. The automated approach for testing such Displays through XY coordinates pointing on screen, taking Screen captures and using optical character recognition for verification methods are non-reliable and affects the performance of testing. This makes automating a test difficult, causes a high amount of risk as well as high maintenance costs. This paper offers recent ideas and its implementation of software testing, on touch screen Displays, which are widely used in sophisticated passenger cars as well as in off-highway equipment like tractors, construction and Forestry etc. In this method of testing the Display's User interface, we use ‘Test Events’ which are linked with different objects/Icons on displays. Every user action like selecting menu item from dropdown, pressing button, swiping, turning pages are considered as unique actions, and these actions are then bundled with unique Object Id data to create the events on the Display. These user events are simulated automatically and the response is monitored and logged for identifying and analyzing Software defects. The architecture is based on "Data Driven Model" where test data is separated from script in order to take care of any changes in quick and agile way. The Data such as unique references to objects and Pools on the screen are placed in SQL Database, this enables to access data from different locations by multiple users. Though, the approach can be widely applied to majority of Touch screen applications, we restrict the scope of this paper to automotive domain due to the Standards and protocol used during implementation.