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BlackHorse: creating smart test cases from brittle recorded tests

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Abstract

Testing software that has a GUI is difficult. Manual testing is costly and error-prone, but recorded test cases frequently “break” due to changes in the GUI. Test cases intended to test business logic must therefore be converted to a less “brittle” form to lengthen their useful lifespan. In this paper, we describe BlackHorse, an approach to doing this that converts a recorded test case to Java code that bypasses the GUI. The approach was implemented within the testing environment of Research In Motion. We describe the design of the toolset and discuss lessons learned during the course of the project.

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Notes

  1. In some shops, any piece of code that acts as a test case is referred to as a “unit test.” We prefer to reserve this phrase for a method that tests a small unit of source code, such as a single class.

  2. Product and framework names have been given pseudonyms here for confidentiality reasons.

  3. Note that the client therefore always had the ability to record test cases and convert them into sequences of keypresses. Test engineers were strongly discouraged from doing this, since it would simply have led to brittle recorded tests in the form of Java code.

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Mark Chatterley, Sebastian Elbaum, Ali Hesson, Johanne Leduc, and Lee Manchur for valuable discussions and comments. Thanks also to the anonymous referees of an earlier version of this paper. The work reported in this paper was supported by an Interaction grant and an Engage grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Santo Carino & James H. Andrews

  2. Research In Motion Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Sheldon Goulding, Pradeepan Arunthavarajah & Jakub Hertyk

Authors
  1. Santo Carino
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  2. James H. Andrews
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  3. Sheldon Goulding
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  4. Pradeepan Arunthavarajah
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  5. Jakub Hertyk
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to James H. Andrews.

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Carino, S., Andrews, J.H., Goulding, S. et al. BlackHorse: creating smart test cases from brittle recorded tests. Software Qual J 22, 293–310 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-013-9203-5

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