Automated System Testing of Dynamic Web Applications

Abstract

Web applications pervade all aspects of human activity today. Rapid growth in the scope, penetration and user-base of web applications, over the past decade, has meant that web applications are substantially bigger, more complex and sophisticated than ever before. This places even more demands on the validation process for web applications. This paper presents an automated approach for the system testing of modern, industrial strength dynamic web applications, where a combination of dynamic crawling-based model generation and back-end model checking is used to comprehensively validate the navigation behavior of the web application. We present several case studies to validate the proposed approach on real-world web applications. Our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach is not only practical in the context of applications of such size and complexity but can provide greater automation and better coverage than current industrial validation practices based on manual testing. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.