WEB BROWSING AUTOMATION FOR APPLICATIONS QUALITY CONTROL
Keywords:
Automated Software Testing, Web Applications, Web Navigation, Functional Assessment, Non-Functional Assessment, Graph TheoryAbstract
Context: Quality control comprises the set of activities aimed to evaluate that software meets its specication and delivers the functionality expected by the consumers. These activities are often removed in the development process and, as a result, the nal software product usually lacks quality. Objective: We propose a set of techniques to automate the quality control for web applications from the client-side, guiding the process by functional and non-functional requirements (performance, security, compatibility, usability and accessibility). Method: The rst step to achieve automation is to dene the structure of the web navigation. Existing software artifacts in the phase of analysis and design are reused. Then, the independent paths of navigation are found, and each path is traversed automatically using real browsers while dierent kinds of assessments are carried out. Results: The processes and methods proposed in this paper have been implemented by means of a reference architecture and open source tools. A laboratory experiment and an industrial case study have been performed in order to validate the proposal. Conclusion: The denition of navigation paths is a rich approach to model web applications. Grey-box (black-box and white-box) methods have been proved to be very valuable for web assessment. The Chinese Postman Problem (CPP) is an optimal way to nd the independent paths in a web navigation modeled as a directed graph.
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