A Survey on Web Application Testing: A Decade of Evolution

TL;DR

This survey reviews the evolution of Web Application Testing over the past decade, highlighting key approaches, tools, and challenges in ensuring web app quality amidst technological advances.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of WAT developments, including test processes, tools, and open research challenges over the last ten years.

Findings

Diverse WAT approaches address dynamic content and asynchronous operations.

Various tools have been developed for different testing aspects.

Open challenges include testing in complex, evolving web environments.

Abstract

As one of the most popular software applications, a web application is a program, accessible through the web, to dynamically generate content based on user interactions or contextual data, for example, online shopping platforms, social networking sites, and financial services. Web applications operate in diverse environments and leverage web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax, often incorporating features like asynchronous operations to enhance user experience. Due to the increasing user and popularity of web applications, approaches to their quality have become increasingly important. Web Application Testing (WAT) plays a vital role in ensuring web applications' functionality, security, and reliability. Given the speed with which web technologies are evolving, WAT is especially important. Over the last decade, various WAT approaches have been developed. The diversity of approaches reflects the many aspects of web applications, such as dynamic content, asynchronous operations, and diverse user environments. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the main achievements during the past decade: It examines the main steps involved in WAT, including test-case generation and execution, and evaluation and assessment. The currently available tools for WAT are also examined. The paper also discusses some open research challenges and potential future WAT work.