Keynote: User Interface Grammars

Abstract. To systematically explore user interfaces, one must cover graphical interaction features (e.g. clicks, swipes) as well as textual interaction features (e.g. form input). We introduce user interface grammars as a single formalism that captures and integrates graphical and textual input languages. A UI grammar encodes graphical interactions and text input as a single (possibly nontrivial) stream of input events, allowing for their uniform treatment in test generation and/or coverage measurement. Grammars can be mined from existing systems (GUI-based or text-based), allow for simple customization by testers (say, for special inputs such as passwords or injection attacks) as well as guidance towards UI (model) coverage and code coverage. Includes live demos!

Andreas Zeller is faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University, both in Saarbrücken, Germany. His research on automated debugging, mining software archives, specification mining, and security testing has been highly influential. Andreas is an ACM Fellow and holds an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.

You can find Andreas on Twitter as @AndreasZeller.