Automated replay and failure detection for web applications

Sprenkle, Sara; Gibson, Emily; Sampath, Sreedevi; Pollock, Lori

doi:10.1145/1101908.1101947

Cited by 67 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…For example, user session data can be used as both input and also test cases [13,44], but there must be a way to compare obtained results with expected results. Lucca et al address web-based application testing with an object-oriented web application model [24].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sprenkle et al and Sampath et al have focused on oracle comparators for testing web-based applications [44][45][46]. They investigate features derived from diff, content, and structure, and refine these features into oracle comparators [46] based on HTML tags, unordered links, tag names, attributes, forms, the document, and content.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Any difference is inspected by developers, as it is commonly an error in the new version, or may indicate an outdated expected output (for example, when the output legitimately changes due to new functionality). Unfortunately, traditional regression testing is particularly burdensome for web-based applications [44] because using diff as the comparator produces too many false positives [46]. For example, rerunning a test suite of a web-based application may result in otherwiseidentical output with a different footer, timestamp, session cookie, or dynamically generated elements.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper presents Smart, a tool for reducing the cost of regression testing for web-based applications by providing a highly precise oracle comparator. We propose to combine insights from structural differencing algorithms (e.g., [3]) in addition to semantic features (e.g., [44]) into a distance metric for test case output. 1 This distance metric forms the center of a highly precise oracle comparator which indicates test case outputs need human inspection when its distance from the oracle output exceeds a certain cutoff.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Automating regression testing using web-based application similarities

Dobolyi

Soechting

Weimer

2010

Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer

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Web-based applications are one of the most widely used types of software, and have become the backbone of many e-commerce and communications businesses. These applications are often mission-critical for many organizations, motivating their precise validation. Although regression testing has been widely used to gain confidence in the reliability of software by providing information about the quality of an application, it has suffered limited use in this domain due to the frequent nature of updates to websites and the difficulty of automatically comparing test case output. We present techniques to address these challenges in regression testing web-based applications. Without precise comparators, test cases that fail due to benign program evolutions must be manually inspected. Our approach harnesses the inherent similarities between unrelated web-based applications to provide fully automated solutions to reduce the number of such false positives, while simultaneously returning true faults. By applying a model derived from regression testing other programs, our approach can predict which test cases merit human inspection. Our method is 2.5 to 50 times as accurate as current industrial practice, but requires no user annotations.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Automating regression testing using web-based application similarities

Dobolyi

Soechting

Weimer

2010

Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Sprenkle et al and Sampath et al have focused on oracle comparators for testing web applications [30], [31], [32]. They investigate features derived from diff, content, and structure, and refine these features into oracle comparators [32] based on HTML tags, unordered links, tag names, attributes, forms, the document, and content.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harnessing Web-Based Application Similarities to Aid in Regression Testing

Dobolyi

Weimer

2009

2009 20th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering

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Web-based applications are growing in complexity and criticality, increasing the need for their precise validation. Regression testing is an established approach for providing information about the quality of an application in the face of recurring updates that dominate the web. We present techniques to address a key challenge of the automated regression testing of web-based applications. Innocuous program evolutions often appear to fail tests and must be manually inspected. We rely on inherent similarities between independent web-based applications to provide fully automated solutions for reducing the number of false positives associated with regression testing such applications, simultaneously focusing on returning all true positives.Our approach predicts which test cases merit human inspection by applying a model derived from regression testing other programs. We are 2.5 to 50 times as accurate as current industrial practice, but require no user annotations.

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Automatically identifying potential regressions in the layout of responsive web pages

Walsh

Kapfhammer

McMinn

2020

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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SummaryProviding a good user experience on the ever‐increasing number and variety of devices being used to browse the web is a difficult, yet critical, task. With responsive web design, front‐end web developers design web pages so that they dynamically resize and rearrange content to best fit the dimensions of a device's screen. However, when making code modifications to a responsive page, developers can easily introduce regressions from the correct layout that have detrimental effects at unpredictable screen sizes. For instance, the source code change that a developer makes to improve the layout at one screen size may obscure a page's content at other sizes. Current approaches to testing are often insufficient because they rely on limited tools and error‐prone manual inspections of web pages. As such, many unintended regressions in web page layout often go undetected and ultimately manifest in production websites. To address the challenge of detecting regressions in responsive web pages, this paper presents an automated approach that extracts the responsive layout of two versions of a page and compares them, alerting developers to the differences in layout that they may wish to investigate further. We implemented the approach and empirically evaluated it on 15 real‐world responsive web pages. Leveraging code mutations that a tool automatically injected into the pages as a systematic simulation of developer changes, the experiments show that the approach was highly effective. When compared with manual and automated baseline testing techniques, it detected 12.5% and 18.75% more injected changes, respectively. Along with identifying the best parameters for the method that extracts the responsive layout, the experiments show that the approach surpasses the baselines across changes that vary in their impact, but works particularly well for subtle, hard‐to‐detect mutants, showing the benefits of automatically identifying regressions in web page layout.

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Automated replay and failure detection for web applications

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 67 publications

References 30 publications

Automating regression testing using web-based application similarities

Automating regression testing using web-based application similarities

Harnessing Web-Based Application Similarities to Aid in Regression Testing

Automatically identifying potential regressions in the layout of responsive web pages

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