Invariant-based automatic testing of AJAX user interfaces

  • Authors:

  • Ali Mesbah;Arie van Deursen

  • Affiliations:

  • Software Engineering Research Group, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands;Software Engineering Research Group, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

AJAX-based Web 2.0 applications rely on stateful asynchronous client/server communication, and client-side runtime manipulation of the DOM tree. This not only makes them fundamentally different from traditional web applications, but also more error-prone and harder to test. We propose a method for testing AJAX applications automatically, based on a crawler to infer a flow graph for all (client-side) user interface states. We identify AJAX-specific faults that can occur in such states (related to DOM validity, error messages, discoverability, back-button compatibility, etc.) as well as DOM-tree invariants that can serve as oracle to detect such faults. We implemented our approach in ATUSA, a tool offering generic invariant checking components, a plugin-mechanism to add application-specific state validators, and generation of a test suite covering the paths obtained during crawling. We describe two case studies evaluating the fault revealing capabilities, scalability, required manual effort and level of automation of our approach.