Model-Based Testing of Community-Driven Open-Source GUI Applications

Although the World-Wide-Web (WWW) has significantly enhanced Open-Source Software (OSS) development, it has also created new challenges for Quality Assurance (QA), especially for OSS with a Graphical-User Interface (GUI) front-end. Distributed communities of developers, connected by the WWW, work concurrently on loosely-coupled parts of the OSS and the corresponding GUI code. Due to the unprecedented code churn rates enabled by the WWW, developers may not have time to determine whether their recent modifications have caused integration problems with the overall OSS; these problems can often be detected via GUI integration testing. However, the resource-intensive nature of GUI testing prevents the application of existing automated QA techniques used during conventional OSS evolution.