Abstract
Test case generation for web applications aims at ensuring full coverage of the navigation structure. Existing approaches resort to crawling and manual/random input generation, with or without a preliminary construction of the navigation model. However, crawlers might be unable to reach some parts of the web application and random input generation might not receive enough guidance to produce the inputs needed to cover a given path. In this paper, we take advantage of the navigation structure implicitly specified by developers when they write the page objects used for web testing and we define a novel set of genetic operators that support the joint generation of test inputs and feasible navigation paths. On a case study, our tool Subweb was able to achieve higher coverage of the navigation model than crawling based approaches, thanks to its intrinsic ability of generating inputs for feasible paths and of discarding likely infeasible paths.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Non-commenting lines of code, calculated by cloc (https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc).
- 3.
References
Mesbah, A., van Deursen, A.: Invariant-based automatic testing of AJAX user interfaces. In: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2009, pp. 210–220. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2009)
Leotta, M., Clerissi, D., Ricca, F., Tonella, P.: Approaches and tools for automated end-to-end web testing. Adv. Comput. 101, 193–237 (2016)
Artzi, S., Dolby, J., Jensen, S.H., Møller, A., Tip, F.: A framework for automated testing of Javascript web applications. In: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2011, pp. 571–580. ACM, New York (2011)
Marchetto, A., Tonella, P., Ricca, F.: State-based testing of ajax web applications. In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, ICST 2008, pp. 121–130. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2008)
Tonella, P., Ricca, F., Marchetto, A.: Recent advances in web testing. Adv. Comput. 93, 1–51 (2014)
Pacheco, C., Lahiri, S.K., Ernst, M.D., Ball, T.: Feedback-directed random test generation. In: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2007, pp. 75–84. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2007)
Yu, B., Ma, L., Zhang, C.: Incremental web application testing using page object. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Third IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Web Systems and Technologies (HotWeb), HOTWEB 2015, pp. 1–6. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2015)
van Deursen, A.: Testing web applications with state objects. Commun. ACM 58(8), 36–43 (2015)
Fraser, G., Arcuri, A.: Whole test suite generation. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 39(2), 276–291 (2013)
Mesbah, A., van Deursen, A., Lenselink, S.: Crawling ajax-based web applications through dynamic analysis of user interface state changes. ACM Trans. Web (TWEB) 6(1), 3:1–3:30 (2012)
Leotta, M., Stocco, A., Ricca, F., Tonella, P.: Robula+: an algorithm for generating robust xpath locators for web testing. J. Softw. Evol. Process 28(3), 177–204 (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Biagiola, M., Ricca, F., Tonella, P. (2017). Search Based Path and Input Data Generation for Web Application Testing. In: Menzies, T., Petke, J. (eds) Search Based Software Engineering. SSBSE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10452. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66299-2_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66299-2_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66298-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66299-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)