Advances in Web Testing

AbstractDemand for high‐quality Web applications continues to escalate as reliance on Web‐based software increases and Web systems become increasingly complex. Given the importance of quality and its impact on the user experience, a significant research effort has been invested in developing tools and methodologies that facilitate effective quality assurance for Web applications. Testing, in particular, provides a critical inroad toward meeting the quality demand by enabling developers to discover failures and anomalies in applications before they are released. In this survey, we discuss advances in Web testing and begin by exploring the peculiarities of Web applications that makes evaluating their correctness a challenge and the direct translation of conventional software engineering principles impractical in some cases. We then provide an overview of research contributions in three critical aspects of Web testing: deriving adequate Web application models, defining appropriate Web testing strategies, and conducting Web portability analysis. In short, models are used to capture Web application components, their attributes, and interconnections; testing strategies use the models to generate test cases; and portability analysis enables Web developers to ensure that their applications remain correct as they are launched in highly diverse configurations.