Web Application Testing

The increased availability and continuous use of the web for daily operations by businesses, consumers, and government has popularized e-commerce and created a great demand for reliable web applications. We have developed automated approaches to improve many stages of the testing process within a customizable framework. Our work focuses on test-suite reduction, oracle comparators, test-suite replay, and test-case generation.

Our Goals

• To perform scalable test suite reduction of user sessions and generate reduced suites that are efficient in terms of program coverage and fault detection ability.
• To perform dynamic analysis of user sessions to understand the usage and dynamic behavior of web applications and to motivate the reduction techniques developed.
• To develop a customizable, automated framework for scalable testing of web applications. We have developed pluggable oracle comparators, test-case replay mechanisms, and test-case generation algorithms that plug into this framework.

Models for Generating Test Cases

• Sara Sprenkle, Lori Pollock, and Lucy Simko. “A Study of Usage-Based Navigation Models and Generated Abstract Test Cases for Web Applications.” International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), IEEE, March 2011. Awarded Best Research Paper

Oracles

• Sara Sprenkle, Lori Pollock, Holly Esquivel, Barbara Hazelwood, and Stacey Ecott. “Automated Oracle Comparators for Testing Web Applications.” 18th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, IEEE, November 2007.

Test-Suite Reduction

• Sreedevi Sampath, Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Lori Pollock, and Amie Souter Greenwald. “Applying Concept Analysis to User-session-based Testing of Web Applications.” Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 33, No. 10, pp. 643-658. IEEE. October 2007.

Test Requirements

• Sreedevi Sampath, Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, and Lori Pollock. “Web Application Testing with Customized Test Requirements–An Experimental Comparison Study.” International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE '06). November 2006.

Framework

• Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Sreedevi Sampath, and Lori Pollock. “Automated Replay and Failure Detection for Web Applications.” International Conference of Automated Software Engineering, IEEE/ACM, pp. 253–262. November 2005.

Complete List of Web Application Testing Project Papers

• Faculty: Lori Pollock
• Collaborators: Dr. Sreedevi Sampath (UMBC), Dr. Amie Souter (Lucent), and Dr. Sara Sprenkle (W&L)
• Undergraduate Students: Camille Cobb
• Previous Ph.D. Student: Emily Gibson Hill
• Past Undergraduate Students: Katie Baldwin, Stacey Ecott (Tufts University), Holly Esquivel (University of Nebraska-Kearney), Barbara Hazelwood (Xavier University), Carrie Hopkins (Washington and Lee University), Valentin Mihaylov (Drexel University), Lucy Simko (Washington & Lee University), Frank Zappaterrini