An exploration of statistical models for automated test case generation

Sant, Jessica; Souter, Amie L.; Greenwald, Lloyd

doi:10.1145/1082983.1083256

Cited by 15 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Sant et al and Sprenkle et al present statistical models that use user sessions to build a control‐flow model of the web application. The navigation coverage of their models depends on the strength of the user sessions, whereas our approach systematically explores all the HTML forms and links in the web application.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although several approaches exist to model the navigation of web applications , our approach is the first to apply combinatorial strategies for systematic coverage of the navigation structure of the web application . Also, several of the existing approaches lack experimental studies, so it is not clear if these approaches will scale to web applications in use today.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Using combinatorial testing to build navigation graphs for dynamic web applications

Wang

Sampath

Lei

et al. 2016

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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Summary Modelling a software system is often a challenging prerequisite to automatic test case generation. Modelling the navigation structure of a dynamic web application is particularly challenging because of the presence of a large number of pages that are created dynamically and the difficulty of reaching a dynamic page unless a set of appropriate input values are provided for the parameters. To address the first challenge, some form of abstraction is required to enable scalable modelling. For the second challenge, techniques are required to select appropriate input values for parameters and systematically combine them to reach new pages. This paper presents a combinatorial approach in building a navigation graph for dynamic web applications. The navigation graph can then be used to automatically generate test sequences for testing web applications. The novelty of our approach is twofold. First, we use an abstraction scheme to control the page explosion problem, where pages that are likely to have the same navigation behaviour are grouped together and are represented as a single node in the navigation graph. Second, assuming that values of individual parameters are supplied manually or generated from other techniques, we combine parameter values such that well‐defined combinatorial coverage of input parameter values is achieved. Using combinatorial coverage can significantly reduce the number of requests that have to be submitted while still achieving effective coverage of the navigation structure. We implement our combinatorial approach in a tool, Tansuo, and apply the tool on seven open‐source web applications. We evaluate the effectiveness of Tansuo's exploration process guided by t‐way coverage, for t = 1,2,3, with respect to code coverage, and find that the navigation structure exploration by Tansuo, in general, results in high code coverage (more than 80% statement coverage for most of our subject applications when dead code is removed). We compare Tansuo's effectiveness with two other navigation graph tools and find that Tansuo is more effective. Our empirical results indicate that using pairwise coverage in Tansuo results in the efficient generation of navigation graphs and effective exploration of dynamic web applications. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using combinatorial testing to build navigation graphs for dynamic web applications

Wang

Sampath

Lei

et al. 2016

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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“…One set of approaches tries to generate usage models from the logged data recorded during the real-users' interactions with the SUT [10,22]. A clear disadvantage of these is the fact that generated models represent the current system behaviour but not the desired one as is the case with manually created usage models.…”

Section: A Selection Of the Formal Notationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A process to increase the model quality in the context of model-based testing

Entin

Winder

Zhang

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)

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In the past years model-based testing (MBT) has become a widely-used approach to the test automation in the industrial context. Until now the application of MBT has been limited to the software quality engineers with very good modelling skills. In order to guarantee the completeness of a model and to increase its precision there is a need to allow the usage of the approach by other project stakeholders such as requirements engineers as well as software quality engineers with a limited modelling experience. In this contribution we share the challenges discovered during the several years of the application of a certain MBT technique in a SCRUM project with particular regard to the definition of precise and complete models. A process which involves the entire software project team into the model definition starting at the very early stages of product development is presented along with its concrete implementation. First experiences with the application of the process in a particular project are presented. 1

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“…An early approach by Kallepalli and Tian [12] mines server logs to build a statistical model of web application usage that can be used to guide testing and measure the reliability of a web application. A subsequent approach by Sant, Souter, and Greenwald [16] focuses on how these statistical models could be used to generate better test cases. Another approach by Elbaum and colleagues [8] captures user-session data and uses the captured data directly as test inputs.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%