Applicability of the ViMoTest Approach for Automated GUI Testing: A Field Study

Automated GUI testing is widely used in practice to ensure high software quality. While current tools and methods support automatic GUI testing, open challenges exist, like specification efforts, fragility problems, and maintainability difficulties. To tackle those challenges, we have proposed the complementary approach ViMoTest as a preliminary concept. The ViMoTest approach aims to automate GUI tests with behavior-oriented test specifications based on ViewModel-abstractions and projectional DSLs to address those open challenges. However, no empirical ev-idence shows the applicability of automated GUI testing with the combination of ViewModels and projectional DSLs. Therefore, we develop a prototypical implementation using JetBrains MPS, extending our preliminary ViMoTest concept as proof of concept. Through a field study for which we applied our prototype to five real-world subject applications, we could show the applicability of our approach with 17 exemplary ViewModels. We successfully modeled 11 standard GUI widgets as first-class constructs and used them in 38 test scenarios in our projectional DSLs. Our field study indicates that the ViMoTest approach is applicable to support test developers in testing the view logic independent of specific GUI frameworks and rendering aspects.