Testing Responsive Web Pages Using the Consistency of Automated Web Pages

The introduction of mobile devices with smaller screens motivates the need for web pages that work correctly across many different devices—referred to as responsive web design. Mobile access is a key feature for companies: both to reach new customers, and also to provide an enhanced service to existing customers. Testing the correct appearance of a responsive web page on different devices is not a trivial task because there are no standard rules for responsiveness, and the layout may need to be significantly rearranged in order to fit on smaller screens. This dissertation describes an investigation into the automated test case generation for responsive web pages. The aim of the project is to develop a novel approach to test responsive web pages for the consistency of their appearance. This thesis develops the idea of consistent web pages which are not identical but provide essentially the same interface to the user. The goal of this project is to develop approach on how to do automated test case generation of the appearance of responsive web page and to evaluate this approach by building a test tool that automate the testing of consistency of responsive web pages against the master copy of the page. Several rules were implemented for comparing web pages displayed on different screens. The results show that the approach taken is an effective way of automating testing for consistency. This dissertation also identifies a number of unanswered research issues to be addressed by future work

Testing Responsive Web Pages Using the Consistency of Automated Web Pages

The introduction of mobile devices with smaller screens motivates the need for web pages that work correctly across many different devices—referred to as responsive web design. Mobile access is a key feature for companies: both to reach new customers, and also to provide an enhanced service to existing customers. Testing the correct appearance of a responsive web page on different devices is not a trivial task because there are no standard rules for responsiveness, and the layout may need to be significantly rearranged in order to fit on smaller screens. This dissertation describes an investigation into the automated test case generation for responsive web pages. The aim of the project is to develop a novel approach to test responsive web pages for the consistency of their appearance. This thesis develops the idea of consistent web pages which are not identical but provide essentially the same interface to the user. The goal of this project is to develop approach on how to do automated test case generation of the appearance of responsive web page and to evaluate this approach by building a test tool that automate the testing of consistency of responsive web pages against the master copy of the page. Several rules were implemented for comparing web pages displayed on different screens. The results show that the approach taken is an effective way of automating testing for consistency. This dissertation also identifies a number of unanswered research issues to be addressed by future work

Collaborative support for distributed design

A number of large integrated projects have been funded by the European Commission within both FP5 and FP6 that have aimed to develop distributed design solutions within the shipbuilding industry. VRShips-ROPAX was funded within FP5 and aimed to develop a platform to support distributed through-life design of a ROPAX (roll-on passenger) ferry. VIRTUE is an FP6 funded project that aims to integrate distributed virtual basins within a platform that allows a holistic Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of a ship to be undertaken. Finally, SAFEDOR is also an FP6 funded project that allows designers to perform distributed Risk-Based Design (RBD) and simulation of different types of vessels. The projects have a number of commonalities: the designers are either organisationally or geographically distributed; a large amount of the design and analysis work requires the use of computers, and the designers are expected to collaborate - sharing design tasks and data. In each case a Virtual Integration Platform (VIP) has been developed, building on and sharing ideas between the projects with the aim of providing collaborative support for distributed design. In each of these projects the University of Strathclyde has been primarily responsible for the development of the associated VIP. This paper describes each project in terms of their differing collaborative support requirements, and discusses the associated VIP in terms of the manner that collaborative support has been provided

On consistency maintenance in service discovery

Communication and node failures degrade the ability of a service discovery protocol to ensure Users receive the correct service information when the service changes. We propose that service discovery protocols employ a set of recovery techniques to recover from failures and regain consistency. We use simulations to show that the type of recovery technique a protocol uses significantly impacts the performance. We benchmark the performance of our own service discovery protocol, FRODO against the performance of first generation service discovery protocols, Jini and UPnP during increasing communication and node failures. The results show that FRODO has the best overall consistency maintenance performance

Measuring the impact of temporal context on video retrieval

In this paper we describe the findings from the K-Space interactive video search experiments in TRECVid 2007, which examined the effects of including temporal context in video retrieval. The traditional approach to presenting video search results is to maximise recall by offering a user as many potentially relevant shots as possible within a limited amount of time. ‘Context’-oriented systems opt to allocate a portion of theresults presentation space to providing additional contextual cues about the returned results. In video retrieval these cues often include temporal information such as a shot’s location within the overall video broadcast and/or its neighbouring shots. We developed two interfaces with identical retrieval functionality in order to measure the effects of such context on user performance. The first system had a ‘recall-oriented’ interface, where results from a query were presented as a ranked list of shots. The second was ‘contextoriented’, with results presented as a ranked list of broadcasts. 10 users participated in the experiments, of which 8 were novices and 2 experts. Participants completed a number of retrieval topics using both the recall-oriented and context-oriented systems

Incremental Consistency Guarantees for Replicated Objects

Programming with replicated objects is difficult. Developers must face the fundamental trade-off between consistency and performance head on, while struggling with the complexity of distributed storage stacks. We introduce Correctables, a novel abstraction that hides most of this complexity, allowing developers to focus on the task of balancing consistency and performance. To aid developers with this task, Correctables provide incremental consistency guarantees, which capture successive refinements on the result of an ongoing operation on a replicated object. In short, applications receive both a preliminary---fast, possibly inconsistent---result, as well as a final---consistent---result that arrives later. We show how to leverage incremental consistency guarantees by speculating on preliminary values, trading throughput and bandwidth for improved latency. We experiment with two popular storage systems (Cassandra and ZooKeeper) and three applications: a Twissandra-based microblogging service, an ad serving system, and a ticket selling system. Our evaluation on the Amazon EC2 platform with YCSB workloads A, B, and C shows that we can reduce the latency of strongly consistent operations by up to 40% (from 100ms to 60ms) at little cost (10% bandwidth increase, 6% throughput drop) in the ad system. Even if the preliminary result is frequently inconsistent (25% of accesses), incremental consistency incurs a bandwidth overhead of only 27%.Comment: 16 total pages, 12 figures. OSDI'16 (to appear

Metamodel-based model conformance and multiview consistency checking

Model-driven development, using languages such as UML and BON, often makes use of multiple diagrams (e.g., class and sequence diagrams) when modeling systems. These diagrams, presenting different views of a system of interest, may be inconsistent. A metamodel provides a unifying framework in which to ensure and check consistency, while at the same time providing the means to distinguish between valid and invalid models, that is, conformance. Two formal specifications of the metamodel for an object-oriented modeling language are presented, and it is shown how to use these specifications for model conformance and multiview consistency checking. Comparisons are made in terms of completeness and the level of automation each provide for checking multiview consistency and model conformance. The lessons learned from applying formal techniques to the problems of metamodeling, model conformance, and multiview consistency checking are summarized