Selecting test cases by cluster analysis of GUI states

Nowadays graphical user interface (GUI) has been widely used in software systems, while there is no efficient testing techniques for the rapidly evolving GUI applications. For the GUI applications are modified rapidly and the test suites trend to be huge in size, it is often desirable to select a subset of test cases to fulfill the regression testing. In this paper, a novel GUI state model is presented to address the execution of test case, and then a state-coverage method based on cluster analysis of the GUI states is proposed to select a reliable subset of test cases for GUI regression testing. An empirical study illustrates that the state-coverage method is effective for GUI test case selection.