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= General Information about AutoQUEST =

AutoQUEST is a software quality assurance tool suite. Within the AutoQUEST  project, we provide research prototypes for testing, analyzing, and observing event-driven software. The two main venues of the project are ''usage-based testing'' and ''usability analysis''. AutoQUEST consists of three main architectural components, as depicted by the following figure. 

[[Image(autoquest-architecture-2.png, nolink, align=center)]]

The '''AutoQUEST Core Library''' is independent of specific event-driven platforms and provides the major features for usage-based testing and usability analysis. It consists of seven components.
 * The ''Event Core'' provides the required classes and interfaces for working with an abstract notion of events independent of any platform. Furthermore, it includes the classes and interfaces required by GUI platforms to create a GUI model. This allows a very powerful and yet platform independent modeling of GUI events.
 * The components ''Usage Profiles'', ''Test Case Generation'', ''Test Oracles'', and ''Test Coverage'' provide support for usage-based software testing. 
 * The components ''Task Trees'' and ''Usability Evaluations'' facilitate usability analysis.

The '''AutoQUEST Plug-ins''' depend on the  AutoQUEST Core Library and build the bridge between abstract events and the platform-independent tooling and concrete event-driven software platforms. Currently, AutoQUEST provides eight plug-ins:
 * The ''Java Foundation Classes'' plug-in supports the analysis of Java applications with a JFC GUI (i.e., AWT/Swing).
 * The ''Microsoft Foundation Classes'' plug-in supports the analysis of Microsoft Windows applications with an MFC GUI. 
 * The ''!JavaScript Web Monitoring'' plug-in provides support for the analysis of websites which are based on plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
 * The ''PHP-based Web Applications'' plug-in supports the analysis of strictly PHP-based websites, i.e., all parts of the website have to use PHP, no other technologies, e.g., simple HTML are allowed.
 * The ''GUITAR'' plug-in provides a bridge to the [http://guitar.sourceforge.net/ GUITAR testing framework].
 * The ''SOA Applications'' plug-in facilitates the application of our techniques to Service Oriented Architectures, e.g., based on SOAP or REST.
 * The ''Generic Event Streams'' plug-in allows to feed AutoQUEST with any type of event streams for further analysis, e.g., to detect stream patterns.
 * The ''AR/VR Appplications'' plug-in is not a plug-in in itself but based on the ''Generic Event Stream'' plug-in to feed AutoQUEST with event streams recorded from AR/VR applications.