Abstract
The desktop ecosystem is full of software applications of all sizes that share a common space. From alarm clocks to agendas, chat programs, or volume widgets, these software applications are usually not regarded as highly critical software, but they are the kind of software used by millions of people every second. Their computer user experience depends heavily on how well these applications behave.
At the same time, these software applications are built using many different development frameworks, each of which has its own development and testing tools. This implies that novel verification approaches, such as property-based testing (PBT) will have a long way until they reach all of them, since technology-specific tools implementing PBT will need to be developed and adopted by their respective developers.
In this paper, we propose an alternative approach that will allow us to test desktop applications in a technology-agnostic manner. Taking advantage of the free and open-source project FreeDesktop, which enables interoperability at the desktop level, and specifically of its D-Bus inter-process communication system, we demonstrate the feasibility of performing automated property-based testing using a tool like QuickCheck, in a powerful, reusable, effort-effective way.
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Castro, L.M. (2015). Sitting Property-Based Testing at the Desktop. In: Moreno-Díaz, R., Pichler, F., Quesada-Arencibia, A. (eds) Computer Aided Systems Theory – EUROCAST 2015. EUROCAST 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9520. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27340-2_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27340-2_30
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