Automated UI testing tools are an essential part of the software development process. While comparative studies have been conducted to evaluate various tools, the identification of the challenges faced by today’s testers remains a crucial task. Our study aims to provide insight into this subject by comparing two widely used testing tools, Selenium and TestComplete, and determining their ease of use and time efficiency. We also consider the learning curve for new testers and provide guidelines for selecting the right tool. Our goal is to evaluate how Selenium and TestComplete compare in terms of ease of use and time efficiency. Our research questions are: (RQ1) Which tool has a shorter implementation time for developers, Selenium or TestComplete? (RQ2) Which tool has a faster execution time for test cases, Selenium or TestComplete? (RQ3) Which tool has a higher number of defects found during testing, Selenium or TestComplete? (RQ4) Which tool has a higher number of false positives found during testing, Selenium or TestComplete? To answer these questions, a controlled experiment was conducted, showing that both tools have similar implementation times. However, Selenium has a faster execution time than TestComplete and a significantly lower occurrence of false positives. These results suggest that Selenium provides a more reliable and user-friendly testing process. In terms of defects found, the data gathering was insufficient and future research is required. Furthermore, we found that there is a limitation to what elements and applications can be tested. In this regard, Selenium showed a more significant limitation than TestComplete for testing an online game application.

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There is a growing amount of digital information available from Open-Data initiatives, Internet-of-Things technologies, and web APIs in general. At the same time, an increasing amount of technology in our lives is creating a desire to take advantage of the generated data for personal or professional interests. Building interactive applications that would address this desire is challenging since it requires advanced engineering skills that are normally reserved for professional software developers. However, more and more interactive applications are prototyped outside of enterprise environments, in more opportunistic settings. For example, knowledge workers apply end-user development techniques to solve their tasks, or groups of friends get together for a weekend hackathon in the hope of becoming the next big startup. This thesis focuses on how to design prototyping tools that support opportunistic development of interactive applications that take advantage of the growing amount of available data. In particular, the goal of this thesis is to understand what are the current challenges of prototyping with data and to identify important qualities of tools addressing these challenges. To accomplish this, declarative development tools were explored, while keeping focus on what data and interaction the application should afford rather than on how they should be implemented (programmed). The work presented in this thesis was carried out as an iterative process which started with a design exploration of Model-based UI Development, followed by observations of prototyping practices through a series of hackathon events and an iterative design of Endev – a prototyping tool for data-driven web applications. Formative evaluations of Endev were conducted with programmers and interaction designers.  The main results of this thesis are the identified challenges for prototyping with data and the key qualities required of prototyping tools that aim to address these challenges. The identified key qualities that lower the threshold for prototyping with data are: declarative prototyping, familiar and setup-free environment, and support tools. Qualities that raise the ceiling for what can be prototyped are: support for heterogeneous data and for advanced look and feel. / Mer och mer digital information görs tillgänglig på olika sätt, t.ex. via öppna data-initiativ, Sakernas internet och API:er. Med en ökande teknikanvändning så skapas även ett intresse för att använda denna data i olika sammanhang, både privat och professionellt. Att bygga interaktiva applikationer som adresserar dessa intressen är en utmaning då det kräver avancerade ingenjörskunskaper, vilket man vanligtvis endast hittar hos professionella programmerare. Sam­tidigt byggs allt fler interaktiva applikationer utanför företagsmiljöer, i mer opportunistiska sammanhang. Detta kan till exempel vara kunskapsarbetare som använder sig av s.k. anveckling (eng. end-user development) för att lösa en uppgift, eller kompisar som träffas en helg för att hålla ett hackaton med hopp om att bli nästa framgångsrika startup-företag. Den här avhandlingen fokuserar på hur prototypverktyg kan utformas för att stödja utveckling av interaktiva applikationer i sådana opportunistiska sammanhang, som utnyttjar den ökande mängden av tillgänglig data. Målet med arbetet som presenteras i den här avhandlingen har varit att förstå utmaningarna som det innebär att använda data i prototyparbete och att identifiera viktiga kvalitéer för de verktyg som ska kunna hantera detta. För att uppnå detta mål har verktyg för deklarativ programmering utforskats med ett fokus kring vilken data och interaktion en applikationen ska erbjuda snarare än hur den ska implementeras. Arbetet som presenteras i den här avhandlingen har genomförts som en iterativ process, med en startpunkt i en utforskning av modellbaserad gränssnittsutveckling, vilket sedan följdes av observationer av prototyparbete i praktiken genom en serie hackathon och en iterativ design av Endev, som är ett prototypverktyg för att skapa datadrivna webbapplikationer. Formativa utvärderingar av Endev har utförts med programmerare och interaktionsdesigners. De viktigaste resultaten av den här avhandlingen är de utmaningar som har identifierats kring hur man skapar prototyper och de kvalitéer som krävs av prototypverktyg som ska adressera dessa utmaningar. De identifierade kvalitéerna som sänker trösklarna för att inkludera data i prototyper är: deklarativt prototyparbete, välbekanta och installationsfria miljöer, och supportverktyg. Kvalitéer som höjer taket för vad som kan göras i en prototyp är: stöd för olika typer av data och för avancerad “look and feel”.

Uppsatsen belyser vilka delar i en kravinsamling som idag ligger till grund för att skapa ett adaptivt användargränssnitt (UI) inom e-handel. För att förstå adaptivitet, i relation till UI, krävs en förståelse av kontext. Definitionen av kontext baseras på vetenskapligt granskade artiklar och förhåller sig mot en kvalitativt insamlade empirin. Den grundar sig i utvecklarens perspektiv och utgår från intervjuer och dokumentanalys. Kontexten kommer i stor utsträckning baseras på vilken enhet användaren brukar, men också vilka potentialer som kontexten har för användarupplevelsen. Det finns adaptiva element som lyfts i kravinsamlingen redan idag, men de tenderar att försvinna i dokumentationen. Således behövs ett nytt sätt att arbeta med kravinsamlingen så att kontextuell påverkan inte glöms bort. Uppsatsen ämnar att fungera som en prospektiv studie som kan ligga till grund för framtida studier inom området.

Formal approaches to software development require that we correctly describe (or specify) systems in order to prove properties about our proposed solution prior to building it. We must then follow a rigorous process to transform our specification into an implementation to ensure that the properties we have proved are retained. When we design and build the user interfaces of our systems we are similarly keen to ensure that they have certain properties before we build them. For example, do they satisfy the requirements of the user? Are they designed with known good design principles and usability considerations in mind? User-centred design approaches, which incorporate many different techniques which we may consider as informal, seek to consider these issues so that the UIs we build are designed around the needs and capabilities of real users. Both formal methods and user-centred design are important and beneficial in the development of underlying system functionality and user interfaces respectively. Given this we would like to be able to use both approaches in one integrated software development process. Their differences, however, make this a challenging objective. In this thesis we present a solution this problem by describing models and techniques which provide a bridge between the existing work of user-centred design practitioners and formal methods practitioners enabling us to incorporate (representations of) informal design artefacts into a formal software development process. We then use these models as the basis for a refinement theory for user interfaces which allows interface designers to retain their informal design methods whilst providing an underlying theory grounded in the trace refinement theory of the Microcharts language.

In this thesis, I present a new platform-independent, open source, intuitive graphical user interface for TopMod, an application designed for interacting with 3-dimensional manifold meshes represented by a Doubly Linked Face List (DLFL). This new interface, created using the Trolltech Qt user interface library, enables users to construct and interact with complex manifold meshes much faster and more easily than was previously possible. I also present a method for the rapid creation of a successful online community of users and developers, by integrating a variety of open source web-based software packages. The new website, which includes a discussion forum, a news blog, a collaborative user and developer wiki, and a source code repository and release manager, received an average of 250 unique visits per day during the first two months of its existence, and it continues to be utilized by a variety of users and developers worldwide.

Testing is a vital part of software development and test automation is an increasingly common practise. Performing automated testing on web-based applications is more complicated than desktop applications, which is particularly clear when it comes to testing a web based user interface as they are becoming more complex and dynamic. Depending on the goals and needed complexity of the testing, a variety of different frameworks/tools are available to help implementing it. This thesis investigates how automated testing of a web-based user interface can be implemented. Testing methods and a selection of relevant testing frameworks/tools are presented and evaluated based on given requirements. Out of the selected frameworks/tools, the Selenium WebDriver framework is chosen and used for implementation. The implementation results in automated test cases for regression testing of the functionality of a user interface created by Infor AB.

<p>Sleek and powerful touchscreen devices with continuous access to high-bandwidth wireless data networks have transformed mobile into a first-class development platform. Many applications (i.e., "apps") written for these platforms rely on remote services such as Dropbox, Facebook, and Twitter, and require users to provide one or more passwords upon installation. Unfortunately, today's mobile platforms provide no protection for users' passwords, even as mobile devices have become attractive targets for password-stealing malware and other phishing attacks.</p><p>This dissertation explores the feasibility of providing strong protections for passwords input on mobile devices without requiring large changes to existing apps.</p><p>We propose two approaches to secure password entry on mobile devices: ScreenPass and VeriUI. ScreenPass is integrated with a device's operating system and continuously monitors the device's screen to prevent malicious apps from spoofing the system's trusted software keyboard. The trusted keyboard ensures that ScreenPass always knows when a password is input, which allows it to prevent apps from sending password data to the untrusted servers. VeriUI relies on trusted hardware to isolate password handling from a device's operating system and apps. This approach allows VeriUI to prove to remote services that a relatively small and well-known code base directly handled a user's password data.</p> / Dissertation

A business application automates a collection of business processes. A business process describes how a set of logically related tasks are executed, ordered and managed by following business rules to achieve business objectives. An “online book purchase” business process contains several tasks such as buying a book, ordering a book, and sending out promotions. In this ever changing business environment, both of business applications and business processes are modified to accommodate changed business requirements and improve the performance of the organization. These continuous modifications introduce problems in the following two aspects: 1) Business process definitions are rarely updated to reflect the current business processes deployed in business applications. 2) Business processes may be cloned (e.g., copied and slightly modified) to handle special circumstances or promotions. Identifying these clones and removing them help improve the efficiency of an organization. However, business processes are defined with textual languages that cannot be automatically understood. To maintain business process definitions up to date, we present our techniques that automatically recover business processes from UIs of business applications and identify clones in the recovered business processes. We leverage UI design patterns, which present the best practices of UI designs, to capture business processes from UIs. To refine the recovered business processes and mark the functionally equivalent tasks, we use existing code clone detection tools, such as CCFinder and CloneDR, to detect clones in business applications, and lift clones from code level to business process level. The effectiveness of our techniques is demonstrated through a case study on 15 large open source business applications. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2008-10-28 11:06:31.41

This thesis presents my work at the company Fatshark AB in Stockholm. My supervisor Rikard Blomberg, who works as a chief technology officer at Fatshark and is one of the owners of the company, explained that they had experienced weaknesses in the methodology used when developing heads up displays (HUD) for their games. In the latest production, Lead  and Gold, the HUD had been redesigned a number of times, becoming an unnecessarily big expense due to the number of work hours invested. In modern software development, an iterative workflow is commonly encouraged. Despite this fact, the work efficiency could likely be increased by setting up guidelines as a help in the process of developing HUDs and reviewing the solutions. There was also a need for a way to estimate a particular redesign’s impact on the game before the actual  implementation had been made, and ways to define the pros and cons of each redesign. My task was to come up with standards for how the different elements in a UI could be structured and reviewed, in order to improve the developing process of the UI and facilitate the communication between employees. These standards were to be designed by a team consisting of Fatshark employees from different work disciplines and myself. / Den här rapporten beskriver mitt exjobb på företaget Fatshark AB i Stockholm. Min handledare Rikard Blomberg, som är chefsprogrammerare och delägare i företaget, förklarade att det fanns brister i deras metodik för utveckling av HUD i deras produktioner. I den senaste titeln, Lead and Gold, hade HUD:en designats om väldigt många gånger, och därför, räknat i arbetstimmar, kostat orimliga summor pengar. Samtidigt som man i modern mjukvaruutveckling ofta främjar en iterativ arbetsmetodik, skulle processen kunna effektiviseras om det sattes upp ramar och planer för hur man ska gå tillväga för att utveckla och mäta kvaliteten på resultatet. Vidare var det önskvärt att i någon utsträckning kunna förutspå vad som kan bli bra innan det läggs in, och att kunna definiera på vilket eller vilka sätt någonting är ”bra”. Mitt uppdrag handlade om att tillsammans med några på företaget ta fram standarder för hur olika delar av spelets HUD (senare omformulerat till att inbegripa UI i allmänhet) ska struktureras och hur man ska kunna använda detta för att effektivisera utvecklingen för att nå snabbare och bättre resultat.