Aiding exploratory testing with pruned GUI models

Exploratory testing is a kind of software testing approach that emphasizes tester's experience to maximize the chances to find bugs within a specific time period. It is naturally a GUI-oriented testing activity for GUI-based systems. We propose aiding exploratory testing by providing a GUI model of the region impacted by the most recent internal code changes. We create such a delimited GUI model by pruning an original GUI model, quickly built by static analysis. This pruned GUI model is result of a reachability analysis between GUI elements and internal source code changes. Only related GUI elements are preserved. To illustrate the idea, we consider five GUI applications found in public repositories with varying changes among them. We present experimental data concerning two executions of two exploratory testing sessions: one without using our proposal and another with our proposal. For both testers, our proposal showed coverage gain in experimental data.