Applying Mutation Testing to Web Applications

Abstract

As our awareness of the complexities inherent in web applications grows, we find an increasing need for more sophisticated ways to test them. Many web application faults are a result of how web software components interact; sometimes client-server and sometimes server-server. This paper presents a novel solution to the problem of integration testing of web applications by using mutation analysis. New mutation operators are defined, a tool (webMuJava) that implements these operators is presented, and results from a case study applying the tool to test a small web application are presented. The results show that mutation analysis can help create tests that are effective at finding web application faults, as well as indicating several directions for improvement.

A mutation carol: Past, present and future

“…Other tools presently in use include Proteum [91,93,94] (built in the 1990s), Csaw [116], Certitude [117], Mu Dynamics [118], Jumble [119], PlexTest [120], Heckle [121], and many more [1]. Mutation has been applied to a variety of program levels and issues including interface mutation [94], class testing [122,112,113,111], multi-class testing [123], object-oriented software [113], web applications [124], real-time software [125], and concurrency [126]; and several new languages, including Python, C#, SQL, Lustre, Ruby, SQL, PHP and AspectJ.…”

On the Improvement of the Mutation Score Using Distinguishing Test Cases

“…Nevertheless, there is a recent paper [12], where the authors describe mutation of web applications. They take a new approach, defining web mutation operators and applying them on HTML and JSP code.…”

Advances in Testing JavaScript-Based Web Applications

“…Praphamontripong and Offutt [55] proposed a set of mutation operators for HTML and Java Server Pages. Maezawa et al [56] used mutation testing to detect delay-based errors in web applications.…”