Title:

A Case Study of Automatically Creating Test Suites from Web Application Field Data

Authors:

Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Sreedevi Sampath, and Lori Pollock

Abstract:

Creating effective test cases is a difficult problem, especially for web applications. To comprehensively test a web application's functionality, test cases must test complex application state dependencies and concurrent user interactions. Rather than creating test cases manually or from a static model, field data provides an inexpensive alternative to creating such sophisticated test cases. An existing approach to using field data in testing web applications is user-session-based testing. Previous user-session-based testing approaches ignore state dependences from multi-user interactions. In this paper, we propose strategies for leveraging web application field data to automatically create test cases that test various levels of multi-user interaction and state dependencies. Results from our preliminary case study of a publicly deployed web application show that these test case creation mechanisms are a promising testing strategy for web applications.

Publisher:

ACM

Book Title:

Workshop on Testing, Analysis and Verification of Web Services and Applications (TAV-WEB 2006)

Date:

July 2006

Project:

Web Application Testing

Document Type:

Conference Proceedings

Key Words:

field data, capture/replay, web applications, test-case generation, multi-user interactions, emulate deployed behavior

Files:

[preprint: Adobe PDF] (150 KB)
[presentation slides: Adobe PDF] (1063 KB)

Bibtex Entry:

@inproceedings{123456789/159,
author = {Sara Sprenkle and Emily Gibson and Sreedevi Sampath and Lori Pollock},
title = {A Case Study of Automatically Creating Test Suites from Web Application Field Data},
booktitle = {Workshop on Testing, Analysis and Verification of Web Services and Applications (TAV-WEB 2006)},
publisher = {ACM},
month = {July},
year = {2006}
}