Research Development: Automated Web Application Testing

Abstract:  A software development process is incomplete without testing and that’s the reason why every organization spends considerable time and effort on testing. New verticals are coming with various revenue models for web-applications which makes testing a crucial part of web development. Same way in the downside new security threats which are plaguing the web applications on daily basis makes testing a must for overall development process. Web application’s dynamic and interactive nature makes it hard to apply traditional testing techniques and tools as they would not be sufficient for their testing. The faster and quicker release cycles of web applications make their testing very challenging. Testing is a prime component in producing quality applications in the domain of software engineering. This research will put the focus on what is automated web application testing, and the current web application testing techniques.

Introduction: High-Level Overview of Automated Testing: Software testing is a huge domain, but it can be broadly categorized into two distinct areas: Manual Testing and Automated Testing. Automated testing is a development process that involves tools to execute predefined tests against software based on the event. Automated testing involves operations that are repetitive in both their nature and outcome. The nature of automated testing for developers is clear as predefined series of the task will be performed(tests) against a set of preconditions and post conditions based upon a triggering event. (2011 ) Automated Software Testing is application and implementation of software technology throughout the entire software testing lifecycle with the goal to improve efficiencies and effectiveness of the product.

It is well-known that manual testing approach is not always effective in finding certain classes of defects, like low-level interface regression testing can be challenging as well as

time-consuming but test-automation offers a possibility to perform these types of testing effectively. Automated testing offers to conduct tests in an asynchronous and autonomous manner. Once automated tests have been developed, they can be run quickly and repeatedly. This is cost-effective method for regression testing of a software product that have a long maintenance life. Complex, evolving and rapidly updated nature of web-applications made their testing challenging as well as critical because traditional approach of testing does not address the distinctive features like ample use of events, rich user interface and incorporation of server-side scripting of web-application. The attributes like speed and reliability which comes with automated testing have made it a mandatory practice in software development process. To keep the development process agile and lean, automated testing is on the rise as there has been an incredible jump in test automation across all industries over the past two years. Authors have suggested various approaches to automated web application testing.

Web Automation Testing Framework-The Evolution:  Test automation has evolved with time, earlier it was just debugging, with the arising of more complex systems software testing idea came into the trend. The reason to develop an automated web application testing framework is to share and access information efficiently and with no limits. With the automation framework by using testing tools separately and also in combined way can solve the various challenges in software testing.

(Angmo & Sharma)The test automation framework integrated by web testing tool, selenium and Jmeter, provides various types of testing for web application. The use of this framework efficiently improves the extensibility and reusability of automation test, also it improves coding productivity as well as product quality. Load testing automation framework for load testing of the web applications is based on usage model and workload to simulate user’s behaviors and help to generate realistic load for load testing of web applications.

Web-Testing Approaches: Long known web testing techniques diffused in current web testing scenario: Web application has mostly human user and that makes quality most prime concern if we are talking about web applications. The challenges in testing increases because of distributed and heterogeneous nature of web applications and as web applications are supporting a vast range of important activities like information sharing, medical system, scientific activities and many more, therefore it becomes really crucial to test all entities of web applications. The usual way to access the components of web-applications is navigation mechanism which is implemented by hyperlinks and that’s why it becomes important to make sure that no unreachable component or broken links are included in web-application. A variety of web-application testing approach has been proposed which satisfies two criteria for web -application testing which is page coverage criterion and hyperlink coverage criterion.

Model Based Testing of Web Applications:  Different testing approaches leads various testing model development-  Web Test Model which is object-oriented where entities are objects and their structure and dynamic behavior is described. One testing approach to generate test cases by using mutation analysis which mainly put the focus on validation regarding reliability of data interactions among xml-based components of web-based applications. Another

model which is based on web-frameset and browser interaction mainly put the focus on modeling web navigation and generate and execute test cases by formalizing the navigation model. The white box testing which is traditional is totally based on the internal structure of the system. To apply white box testing we follow two approaches: one by seeing the level of abstraction of code, for example one of the proposed ‬UML model ‭ ‬of ‭ ‬Web application for high level abstraction. ‭ ‬This model entirely based on static HTML links and dynamic aspects of the software cannot be incorporated in this, and second by using navigation among the pages. The navigation model is based on the graph where each web page is node and each link an edge. On the other hand, black box-testing is not dependent on code structure and implementation. The combinatorial model represents how the web application behaves and based on that it generates test cases, this is another testing approach in which test cases can be created based on collected user interaction with the web application.‬ ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

There is a major difference between non-equivalence issues when we talk about traditional software testing and web application testing. Like maintenance at a faster rate compared to other software systems, because of the huge user population, high demand server’s performance is a must for web applications. Also, we cannot skip dealing with concurrent transactions, web content rendering capability should be looked when large user population is accessing the web application at the same time.

Now comes the architecture because this is the main difference between traditional and web application testing as web-application poses a multi-tier architecture, so it becomes tough to find the error as it could be in any layer, and that brings end-to-end testing techniques which test the overall behavior of web applications. Though we can list out some web-specific faults like authentication problem, incorrect multilanguage support, cross-browser portability, wrong session management and more. The main concern the researchers discussed is that heterogeneous nature of web applications (different programming languages, various technologies: ruby on rails, ajax, flash, and many more) makes testing of the web application a tough task as generating a test environment for this type of application is not easy. As it is very clear that web applications are prone to faults because of the emergence of new technologies also because of asynchronous communication, stateful client, DOM manipulation, so it becomes crucial to consider these aspects of web applications like state navigation, asynchronous behavior, delta server message, transition navigation, and the stateful behavior.

(Arora & Sinha, 2012 )State of art of web application testing: Among all the testing tools for web application testing the main focus is on protocol performance, load testing, validating HTML. The testing tools in web application testing dimension are able to generate automatic test cases. In context of state of art of web application testing the research illustrates that we can easily bridge the gap by using conventional technique for server side and various level testing for client side. For example, Selenium which provides DOM based testing with capturing user sessions. State analysis testing approach fails due to dynamic behavior of recent and modern web applications. Here comes invariant based automatic testing approach. Though two well-known testing techniques has been discussed but issues related to scalability or how to capture user session still remains. The overall point is the testing is dependent on implementation technologies, so it is required to be more adaptive towards heterogeneity and dynamic nature of web applications.

Web Application Testing Methodology: There are different types of testing techniques has been proposed and presented by researchers for web-application testing like ( Lakshmi & Mallika, 2017)Structural testing which performs data flow analysis on web applications, Statistical testing basically, generates input sequence to test the interactions with web applications, Mutation testing provides effective coverage criterion for web-applications, Combinatorial interaction testing generates test case by using unique input space matrix for web applications. ‭ Search ‭ ‬based ‭ ‬software ‭ ‬engineering ‭ ‬testing’s main idea is to provide branch coverage of web applications. GUI interaction testing is used to test the correctness by observing the state of the gui widgets. Cross browser ‭ ‬compatibility ‭ ‬testing checks web ‭ ‬applications deployment across ‭ ‬different ‬browsers. Browser fuzzing by scheduled mutation approach validates browser by using the static and dynamic ways. Invariant-based technique mainly designs a state flow graph with all the possible user interaction sequences. Model-based testing technique in which web application is reduced to a state transition graph and navigation ‬‬through links can be tested.‬ ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Automated Functional Testing Based on the Navigation of Web-applications:  Complex nature of web-applications makes their testing intricate hard and time-consuming, and here test-automation becomes really crucial to avoid the scenarios of poorly performed testing. In very simple terms functional requirements are actions that are expected from an application to do. Therefore, the evaluation of the correct navigation of web applications performs the assessment of the specified functional requirements. Implementation within a framework makes automated testing more effective. Abstract concepts, procedures, and environment define the

testing framework in which automated tests will be designed and implemented. The very first generation follows the linear approach of automated testing, the second generation has two frameworks: data-driven (typically stored in the database) and functional decomposition (the process of producing modular components). The third generation of automated testing includes keyword-driven and model-based frameworks.

Findings: It is needed to develop a new benchmark to indicate the health of a web application. It is quite clear that there are not much tools available that test the non-functional attributes (reliability, trustworthiness, fault-tolerance) of web-applications. It is required to construct a model for structural testing which is normally carried out manually. Recent web application testing tool are able to automate test case generation, their execution and also the evaluation of test result. Well known testing techniques like state-based testing and invariant-based testing has been successfully applied to various case studies but still the problem remains mainly related to scalability issues. Also, how to capture user session data? How to avoid state explosion problem and how to reduce state-spaces? Among all these various approaches of web-testing there is no superior to other as the factors and deployment environment affects the results. The findings state that generating a test environment to test the latest web technology designed web applications is the prime need in today’s testing dimension.

Conclusions: Test automation can bring many benefits like reusability, reliability, simultaneity and continuity also, it allows to build better apps with less effort. Maintaining quality execution across web applications is key to the customer experience and this is what

means testing. It is needed to detect defects early in development lifecycle and testing automation is the best answer for this. It is required to develop a framework using proposed strategies for automated testing of web applications. (Garc´ıa)the significant conclusion is that the further research efforts should be spent to define and assess the effectiveness of testing models, methods, techniques and tools that can combine the conventional testing approaches with new and specific ones.

Also, today all web application moving towards cloud-based services, next important approach is exploring the automated web application testing in this dimension. Understanding the dynamic and asynchronous nature of web application will definitely help in developing automated testing for web applications. Still lot of scope is available to explore the horizons of automated web application testing.

References:

• Lakshmi, D., & Mallika, S. (2017, August ). Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320248662_A_Review_on_Web_Application_Testing_and_its_Current_Research_Directions
• (2011 , June 9). Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3e1c/c8242065c7899139db4d4287e12cbe88c8d2.pdf
• An Automated Web Application Testing System. (2014, August). Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/961c/5dfd7c3c87583298d6eca1ac3284494a15ef.pdf
• Angmo, R., & Sharma, M. (n.d.). International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Computational and Applied Sciences (IJETCAS). Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0343/26b357620d6de180105dce67e957e2333875.pdf
• Arora, A., & Sinha, M. (2012 , February). Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2811/5c63c146e4b77fa690e5a55175a36dacc634.pdf?_ga=2.237913024.114458962.1543100015-869717380.1543100015
• Garc´ıa, B. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2357.pdf