A Framework for the Gamification of GUI Testing

Software testing is a critical activity in the software development process. Several techniques have been proposed, addressing different levels of granularity from low-level unit testing to higher-level exploratory testing through the software’s graphical user interface (GUI). In modern software development, most test cases are obtained by automated test generation. However, while automation generally achieves high coverage in code-level white-box testing, it does not always generate realistic sequences of interactions with the GUI. By contrast, manual exploratory testing has survived as a costly, error-prone, and tedious yet crucial activity. Gamification is seen as an opportunity to increase user satisfaction and engagement while performing testing activities. It could also enable and encourage crowdsourced testing tasks. The purpose of the study described in this chapter is to provide a framework of gamification mechanics and dynamics that can be applied to the practice of manual exploratory GUI testing. We provide an implementation of the framework as an extension of an existing manual exploratory GUI testing for Web applications, and we provide a preliminary evaluation of the gamified tool in terms of provided efficiency, effectiveness, and user experience. Our results show that the gamified solution makes the testers obtain test suites with higher coverage while reducing slightly the number of bugs signalled while traversing the applications under test. The gamified tool also was considered to provide a positive user experience, and the majority of participants expressed their willingness to use such instruments again in the future. As future work, we foresee the implementation of the framework in a stand-alone tool and in-depth empirical experiment to evaluate quantitatively the benefits and drawbacks provided by such mechanics in real testing scenarios.