An Automated Web Application Testing System

Abstract

Web applications are dynamic and interactive, as compared to traditional applications. Therefore, traditional testing techniques and tools are not sufficient for web applications testing. This paper presents a proposed Web testing approach, in which hyperlinks of the website to be tested are automatically followed one by one to retrieve all HTML texts of its pages starting from the home page. The HTML text of each encountered page is analyzed to extract the needed information about it. Then, the collected information is used in the error checking process. The proposed approach guaranties the satisfaction of two web application testing criteria, namely page coverage criterion and hyperlink coverage criterion. The paper also describes an automated Web application testing system that has been developed to implement the proposed approach. The effectiveness of the proposed approach and the developed system in discovering several possible Web applications errors is demonstrated through a case study.