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.

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 six 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 a MFC GUI.
• 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 ​GUITAR testing framework.
• The JavaScript Web Monitoring plug-in provide better support for the analysis of websites than the PHP-based Web Applications plug-in, to broaden the scope of websites we can analyze. For example, it is capable of recording more details of user interactions and to prevent interferences of browser and proxy caching mechanisms.
• The SOA Applications plug-in facilitates the application of our techniques to Service Oriented Architectures, e.g., based on SOAP or REST.