A Review on Web Application Testing and its Current Research Directions

Testing is an important part of every software development process on which companies devote considerable time and effort. The burgeoning web applications and their proliferating economic significance in the society made the area of web application testing an area of acute importance. The web applications generally tend to take faster and quicker release cycles making their testing very challenging. The main issues in testing are cost efficiency and bug detection efficiency. Coverage-based   testing is the process of ensuring exercise of specific program elements. Coverage measurement helps determine the “thoroughness” of testing achieved. An avalanche of tools, techniques, frameworks came into existence to ascertain the quality of web applications.  A comparative study of some of the prominent tools, techniques and models for web application testing is presented. This work highlights the current research directions of some of the web application testing techniques

HTCPM: A HYBRID TEST CASE PRIORITIZATION MODEL FOR WEB AND GUI APPLICATIONS

Web and Event-driven applications (EDS) is a class of applications that is quickly becoming ubiquitous. All EDS take sequences of events (e.g., messages, mouse-clicks) as input, change their state, and produce an output (e.g., events, system calls, text messages), where as in web, user session data gathered as users operate web applications can be considered as input, change their state, and produce an output. Examples include web applications, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), network protocols, device drivers, and embedded applications. Testing for functional correctness of EDS such as stand-alone GUI and web-based applications is critical to many organizations. These applications share several important characteristics. Both are particularly challenging to test because users can invoke many different sequences of events that affect application behavior. Hence here a novel model is provided to rank the test cases based on their prioritization

Test suite prioritization techniques applied to Web-based applications

Web applications have rapidly gained importance in many businesses. The increased usage of web applications has created a challenging need for efficient and effective web application testing strategies. This thesis examines one aspect of web testing, that of test suite prioritization. We examine new test suite prioritization strategies that may improve the rate of fault detection for user-session based test suites. These techniques consider test-lengths and systematic coverage of parameter-values and their interactions. Experimental results show that some of these prioritization strategies often improve the rate of fault detection of test suites when compared to random ordering of the test cases. In general the most effective prioritization strategies consider the systematic coverage of the combinations of parameter-values as early as possible

Automated Usability Testing Of Websites Using Link Structure

Websites keeps getting more important in business and other aspects of society. Making the websites as usable as possible is crucial as difficult to use systems tend to frustrate users, which might lead to users leaving or lost revenue for a business. Usability testing is needed to identify and fix those issues. Manual tests in usability labs can be very time consuming and costly. An automated system could reduce time and cost of testing, but are often too focused on one aspect to give a clear view of what needs to be fixed. A system to improve this is needed. 4 separate modules focusing on different aspects of testing the information structure and navigation of a website are implemented and tested. The modules are combined in a system that gather the results from each module and provide a better overview of the usability issues of a website

Hybrid and dynamic static criteria models for test case prioritization of web application regression testing

In software testing domain, different techniques and approaches are used to support the process of regression testing in an effective way. The main approaches include test case minimization, test case selection, and test case prioritization. Test case prioritization techniques improve the performance of regression testing by arranging test cases in such a way that maximize fault detection could be achieved in a shorter time. However, the problems for web testing are the timing for executing test cases and the number of fault detected. The aim of this study is to increase the effectiveness of test case prioritization by proposing an approach that could detect faults earlier at a shorter execution time. This research proposed an approach comprising two models: Hybrid Static Criteria Model (HSCM) and Dynamic Weighting Static Criteria Model (DWSCM). Each model applied three criteria: most common HTTP requests in pages, length of HTTP request chains, and dependency of HTTP requests. These criteria are used to prioritize test cases for web application regression testing. The proposed HSCM utilized clustering technique to group test cases. A hybridized technique was proposed to prioritize test cases by relying on assigned test case priorities from the combination of aforementioned criteria. A dynamic weighting scheme of criteria for prioritizing test cases was used to increase fault detection rate. The findings revealed that, the models comprising enhanced of Average Percentage Fault Detection (APFD), yielded the highest APFD of 98% in DWSCM and 87% in HSCM, which have led to improve effectiveness prioritization models. The findings confirmed the ability of the proposed techniques in improving web application regression testing

Improved web page traverse using genetic algorithm

Correct navigational behavior of a web application is essential to its reliability. An effective means to improving our confidence in the correct behavior of a web application is to test it by exploring the possible navigation among the web pages at the client side: The tester carries out the testing by consecutively clicking the hyperlinks along with some possible search parameters and checking whether the returned web pages are as expected. Traditional conformance testing techniques based on graph can be adopted in this setting to automatically generate suitable test sequences to traverse among client pages. In this thesis, we present an improvement on T-method for test sequence generation to reduce considerably its length by making use of a genetic algorithm. Our experiments show a 340%-68% saving on the test sequence lengths compared to the direct application of T-method

Modeling a Realistic Workload for Performance Testing

Abstract—Load testing of web applications can be specified by simulating realistic user behavior with stochastic form-oriented analysis models. Stochastic models have advantages over load test models that simply play back recorded session data: they are easier to specify and achieve a higher coverage of the different operational paths. There are challenges when specifying load tests such as the generation of form parameters and the recognition of pages returned by the system. We propose how these challenges can be overcome by adding additional specifications to a form-oriented model. Furthermore, we discuss several workload models and explain why some commonly used workload models are in fact unrealistic and produce misleading results. The stochastic form-oriented load testing approach can be generalized to deal with other submit-response systems such as those consisting of web services. I

Análisis de Enfoques de Model Based Testing para Pruebas Funcionales orientados a Aplicaciones Web

En los últimos años las aplicaciones web han ido incrementando en número y a la vez en complejidad debido a la incorporación de nueva tecnología. Esto ha repercutido en un aumento de complejidad de la fase de pruebas dentro del ciclo de vida del desarrollo de software, la cual nos permite asegurar la calidad del producto desarrollado. Esta fase representa un mayor costo y esfuerzo. Con otro tipo de aplicaciones no se le asignaba el tiempo ni esfuerzo necesario. Sin embargo, debido al impacto que puede tener una aplicación web mal probada durante la puesta en marcha de la aplicación, han surgido diversas investigaciones en técnicas para la simplificación de la fase de pruebas. Una de estas técnicas es model based testing, que mediante la representación del comportamiento esperado de la aplicación, genera automáticamente los casos de prueba, incluso permite la ejecución automática de los mismos y su evaluación. El presente trabajo presenta una revisión analítica de los enfoques en model based testing para aplicaciones web orientados a pruebas funcionales, identificando para ello los enfoques existentes dentro de este contexto y realizando un esquema de caracterización para el análisis de las principales características, herramientas y documentación disponible para la aplicación de los enfoques.Universidad de Sevilla. Master Universitario en Ingeniería y Tecnología del Softwar