X-PERT: Accurate identification of cross-browser issues in web applications

Abstract

Abstract-Due to the increasing popularity of web applications, and the number of browsers and platforms on which such applications can be executed, cross-browser incompatibilities (XBIs) are becoming a serious concern for organizations that develop web-based software. Most of the techniques for XBI detection developed to date are either manual, and thus costly and error-prone, or partial and imprecise, and thus prone to generating both false positives and false negatives. To address these limitations of existing techniques, we developed X-PERT, a new automated, precise, and comprehensive approach for XBI detection. X-PERT combines several new and existing differencing techniques and is based on our findings from an extensive study of XBIs in real-world web applications. The key strength of our approach is that it handles each aspects of a web application using the differencing technique that is best suited to accurately detect XBIs related to that aspect. Our empirical evaluation shows that X-PERT is effective in detecting real-world XBIs, improves on the state of the art, and can provide useful support to developers for the diagnosis and (eventually) elimination of XBIs.

Automated layout failure detection for responsive web pages without an explicit oracle

“…e RLG di ers from other layout graph models of a web page (e.g., the "alignment graph" of Choudhary et al [38] and the "layout graph" of Alameer et al [17]) in that it models the layout of a web page over a range of viewport widths -rather than a single, static width -in order to capture its responsive design.…”

“…Our methodology for answering RQ1 and RQ2 involved the manual analysis and classi cation of both the individual failures reported by our tool and the spotchecking screenshots. As with other empirical studies of presentation failures in web sites (e.g., [17,21,35,38]), this task must necessarily be manual. To mitigate subjectivity a ecting our results, each categorization made by the rst author was veri ed by the last.…”

“…For instance, work on detecting cross-browser issues (XBIs) [38] involves extracting a model of web page layout (i.e., an "alignment graph") of a page in two di erent browsers. Any di erence in the graph extracted from the two di erent browser renderings is reported as an XBI.…”

“…All of the previously discussed approaches use an alternative version of the page as an oracle -represented as a graph -but are not designed to nd RLFs (in the case of XBI and IPF detection [17,38]) or pinpoint RLFs as opposed to general changes (in the case of RWD regression checking [40]). Like current work on XBI and IPF detection, other methods for detecting presentation failures in web pages also only handle the non-responsive case, assuming a xed viewport size and static layout.…”

ReDeCheck: an automatic layout failure checking tool for responsively designed web pages

“…X P [16] and [3] used the same concept of relative layout to detect cross-browser inconsistencies (XBIs) and internationalization presentation failures (IPFs), respectively. W S [10] and W…”