Current industrial software development processes are designed to respond to rapid changes or modifications to software functionality. Delta testing is a technique used to verify that the changes identified are intentional and do not compromise existing functionality or introduce new defects. Our partners at UPV are working on this topic, as can be seen from the scientific paper published at the Research Challenges in Information Science conference, with special theme on Information Science and the Connected World [1].
The proposal is a technique for delta testing at the Graphical User Interface (GUI) level. We use scriptless testing and state model inference to automatically detect and visualise GUI changes between different versions of the same application. Our proposed offline change detection algorithm compares two existing GUI state models to detect changes. We performed a proof-of-concept experiment using the open-source application Notepad++, which allows automatic inference and highlights GUI changes. The results show that our technique is a valuable addition to scriptless testing tools for delta testing.
Furthermore, this proposal can help to improve the learning of delta testing by allowing the visualisation of unintentional changes. We advocate that is a simple way to learn delta testing of different releases. The next steps in this research correspond to the use of the GUI change detection proposal in testing courses to obtain feedback on usability as well as the learning effectiveness.
More details about the GUI change detection approach and the study conducted can be found in the following reference:
[1] Fernando Pastor Ricós, Rick Neeft, Beatriz Marín, Tanja E. J. Vos, Pekka Aho: Using GUI Change Detection for Delta Testing. RCIS 2023: 509-517. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33080-3_32
