Automated Functional Testing based on the Navigation of Web Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated testing approach for web applications based on navigation, utilizing UML, Selenium, and XML inputs, validated through a real invoice management case study.

Contribution

It presents a novel four-level automation method for web app testing driven by multiple input models, implemented in an open-source framework.

Findings

Effective test case generation from models and scripts

Successful validation on a real-world invoice system

Open-source implementation available for practitioners

Abstract

Web applications are becoming more and more complex. Testing such applications is an intricate hard and time-consuming activity. Therefore, testing is often poorly performed or skipped by practitioners. Test automation can help to avoid this situation. Hence, this paper presents a novel approach to perform automated software testing for web applications based on its navigation. On the one hand, web navigation is the process of traversing a web application using a browser. On the other hand, functional requirements are actions that an application must do. Therefore, the evaluation of the correct navigation of web applications results in the assessment of the specified functional requirements. The proposed method to perform the automation is done in four levels: test case generation, test data derivation, test case execution, and test case reporting. This method is driven by three kinds of inputs: i) UML models; ii) Selenium scripts; iii) XML files. We have implemented our approach in an open-source testing framework named Automatic Testing Platform. The validation of this work has been carried out by means of a case study, in which the target is a real invoice management system developed using a model-driven approach.