Leveraging task-based data to support functional testing of web applications

Abstract

Testing is paramount in order to assure the quality of a software product. Over the last years, several techniques have been proposed to leverage the testing phase as a simple and efficient step during software development. However, the features of the web environment make application testing fairly complex. The existing approaches for web application testing are usually driven to specific scenarios or application types, and few solutions are targeted for testing the functional requirements of applications. In order to tackle this problem, we propose a task-based testing approach that provides high coverage of functional requirements. Our technique consists of reassembling classical graph algorithms in order to generate all the possible paths for the execution of a task. Performed experiments indicate that our approach is effective for supporting the functional testing of web applications.