Reducing GUI test suites via program slicing

A crucial problem in GUI testing is the identification of accurate event sequences that encode corresponding user interactions with the GUI. Ultimately, event sequences should be both feasible (i. e., executable on the GUI) and relevant (i.e., cover as much of the code as possible). So far, most work on GUI testing focused on approaches to generate feasible event sequences. In addition, based on event dependency analyses, a recently proposed static analysis approach systematically aims at selecting both relevant and feasible event sequences. However, statically analyzing event dependencies can cause the generation of a huge number of event sequences, leading to unmanageable GUI test suites that are not executable within reasonable time. In this paper we propose a refined static analysis approach based on program slicing. On the theoretical side, our approach identifies and eliminates redundant event sequences in GUI test suites. Redundant event sequences have the property that they are guaranteed to not affect the test effectiveness. On the practical side, we have implemented a slicing-based test suite reduction algorithm that approximatively identifies redundant event sequences. Our experiments on six open source GUI applications show that our reduction algorithm significantly reduces the size of GUI test suites. As a result, the overall execution time could significantly be reduced without losing test effectiveness.