Modeling and automated blackbox regression testing of web applications

Abstract

Web applications are nowadays at the heart of the business world. All corporate companies and big institutions have very busy e-commerce web sites that host a major part of their businesses. With this great emergence of web applications, techniques for maintaining their high quality attributes should be developed and exercised. Moreover, the quick evolution of web technology and the high user demands made web applications subject to rapid maintenance and change, which require the development of efficient regression testing techniques. The current testing efforts documented in research deal with a specific part of a web application. While some papers model and test the server side programs of the application, others model and analyze the navigation between pages as seen by the user, and yet others deal with analyzing the architectural environment of the web application. Motivated by the fact that there is no single model to represent the entire web application, and to model it from different perspectives at the same time, we propose a single analysis model with it testing techniques which models and tests the three poles of the web application: the client side pages navigated by the user, the server side programs executed at runtime, and the architectural environment hosting the application. Having discovered, as well, that there is no automated black box regression testing technique, we also propose a methodology and algorithm to create a tool capable of applying black box regression testing automatically