Deploying TESTAR to Enable Remote Testing in an Industrial CI Pipeline: A Case-Based Evaluation

Companies are facing constant pressure towards shorter release cycles while still maintaining a high level of quality. Agile development, continuous integration and testing are commonly used quality assurance techniques applied in industry. Increasing the level of test automation is a key ingredient to address the short release cycles. Testing at the graphical user interface (GUI) level is challenging to automate, and therefore many companies still do this manually. To help find solutions for better GUI test automation, academics are researching scriptless GUI testing to complement the script-based approach. In order to better match industrial problems with academic results, more academia-industry collaborations for case-based evaluations are needed. This paper describes such an initiative to improve, transfer and integrate an academic scriptless GUI testing tool TESTAR into the CI pipeline of a Spanish company Prodevelop. The paper describes the steps taken, the outcome, the challenges, and some lessons learned for successful industry-academia collaboration.