research-article

Free access

Testing web applications with state objects

Author:

Arie van DeursenAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 58, Issue 8

Pages 36 - 43

https://doi.org/10.1145/2755501

Published: 23 July 2015 Publication History

All formats PDF

Abstract

Use states to drive your tests.

References

[1]

AngularJS. ngInclude directive; https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/directive/ngInclude.

Google Scholar

[2]

Antoniol, G., Briand, L.C., Di Penta, M. and Labiche, Y. A case study using the round-trip strategy for state-based class testing. In Proceedings 13^th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering. IEEE (2002), 269--279.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

Binder, R.V. Testing Object-oriented Systems. Addison-Wesley, Reading, PA, 1999, Chapter 7.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Fowler, M. PageObject, 2013; http://martinfowler.com/bliki/PageObject.html.

Google Scholar

[5]

Harel, D. 1987. Statecharts: a visual formalism for complex systems. Science of Computer Programming 8(3): 231--274.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

Horrocks, I. Constructing the User Interface with Statecharts. Addison-Wesley, Reading, PA, 1999.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

Leotta, M., Clerissi, D., Ricca, F., Spadaro, C. Improving test suites maintainability with the page object pattern: An industrial case study. In Proceedings of the Testing: Academic and Industrial Conference---Practice and Research Techniques. IEEE (2013), 108--113.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Mesbah, A., van Deursen, A. and Roest, D. Invariant-based automatic testing of modern Web applications. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 38, 1 (2012) 35--53.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[9]

North, D. What's in a story?; http://dannorth.net/whats-in-a-story/.

Google Scholar

[10]

Selenium. Page Objects, 2013; https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/wiki/PageObjects

Google Scholar

[11]

Selenium. Promises. In WebDriverJS User's Guide, 2014; https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/WebDriverJs#Promises.

Google Scholar

[12]

SeleniumHQ. WebDriver; http://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/.

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Pradhan SRay MPatnaik S(2020)Clustering of Web Application and Testing of Asynchronous CommunicationInternational Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence10.4018/IJACI.201907010310:3(33-59)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/IJACI.2019070103
Leotta MBiagiola MRicca FCeccato MTonella P(2020)A Family of Experiments to Assess the Impact of Page Object Pattern in Web Test Suite Development2020 IEEE 13th International Conference on Software Testing, Validation and Verification (ICST)10.1109/ICST46399.2020.00035(263-273)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST46399.2020.00035
Biagiola MStocco ARicca FTonella PDumas MPfahl DApel SRusso A(2019)Diversity-based web test generationProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3338906.3338970(142-153)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3338906.3338970
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Testing web applications with state objects
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
  2. Information storage systems
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

Recommendations

Web applications testing techniques: a systematic mapping study

Due to the importance of web application testing techniques for detecting faults and assessing quality attributes, many research papers were published in this field. For this reason, it became essential to analyse, classify and summarise the research in ...
Coverage Criteria for State-Based Testing: A Systematic Review

State-based testing SBT is known as deriving test cases from state machines and examining the dynamic behaviour of the system. It helps to identify various types of state-based faults within a system under test SUT. For SBT, test cases are generated ...
Testing web applications

Traditional testing techniques are not adequate for web-based applications, since they miss their additional features such as their multi-tier nature, hyperlink-based structure, and event-driven feature. Limited work has been done on testing web ...

Reviews

Reviewer: Amos O Olagunju

Effective techniques for concealing web page complexities in end-to-end testing of web applications require the use of page objects. But how should page objects be constructed for successfully testing alternative web applications__?__ What should be the actions and test scenarios of targeted page objects__?__ Van Deursen offers great insightful solutions to these questions in this lively professional practice article. Indeed, tools such as WebDriver, which provide page or state objects, support information hiding and the use of an application program interface (API) for implementing domains of web features on top of web pages. The author illuminates the power of formal languages, such as the unified modeling language (UML), in support of the use of state charts and objects to test the various displays and responses of web browsers to varieties of events like user registration and authentication. So why should web application developers read this compelling practice article__?__ The author presents real-world explanatory applications of state graphs and transition trees for testing several web features. The presentation of the use of WebDriver and state objects to test an AngularJS PhoneCat application is lively. Certainly, state objects should encapsulate the details of browser interactions in web applications. Web developers ought to be free to hide test scenarios of web features in any robust complex web design process. Consequently, the author advocates the use of object machine states for modeling the development and testing the actions and behaviors of end-to-end web applications. I strongly encourage all educators of current and future software engineers working on web service design and implementation to read and take advantage of the web testing ideas in this paper. Online Computing Reviews Service

Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

Communications of the ACM Volume 58, Issue 8

August 2015

88 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/2808213

Editor:
Moshe Y. Vardi
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 July 2015

Published in CACM Volume 58, Issue 8

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article
Popular
Refereed

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

11
Total Citations
View Citations
5,880
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)274
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)11

Reflects downloads up to 30 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Pradhan SRay MPatnaik S(2020)Clustering of Web Application and Testing of Asynchronous CommunicationInternational Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence10.4018/IJACI.201907010310:3(33-59)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/IJACI.2019070103
Leotta MBiagiola MRicca FCeccato MTonella P(2020)A Family of Experiments to Assess the Impact of Page Object Pattern in Web Test Suite Development2020 IEEE 13th International Conference on Software Testing, Validation and Verification (ICST)10.1109/ICST46399.2020.00035(263-273)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST46399.2020.00035
Biagiola MStocco ARicca FTonella PDumas MPfahl DApel SRusso A(2019)Diversity-based web test generationProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3338906.3338970(142-153)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3338906.3338970
Ricca FLeotta MStocco A(2019)Three Open Problems in the Context of E2E Web Testing and a Vision: NEONATE10.1016/bs.adcom.2018.10.005(89-133)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.adcom.2018.10.005
Zhang GZhao J(2019)Scenario Testing of AngularJS-Based Single Page Web ApplicationsCurrent Trends in Web Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-51253-8_10(91-103)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-51253-8_10
Leotta MStocco ARicca FTonella P(2018) P esto : Automated migration of DOM‐based Web tests towards the visual approach Software Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.166528:4Online publication date: 30-Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1665
Stocco ALeotta MRicca FTonella P(2017)APOGENSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-016-9331-925:3(1007-1039)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11219-016-9331-9
Biagiola MRicca FTonella P(2017)Search Based Path and Input Data Generation for Web Application TestingSearch Based Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-66299-2_2(18-32)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66299-2_2
Salvaneschi PDillon LVisser WWilliams L(2016)System testing of repository-style softwareProceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion10.1145/2889160.2889239(172-181)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2889160.2889239
Huisman MBos HBrinkkemper Svan Deursen AGroote JLago Pvan de Pol JVisser E(2016)Software that Meets Its IntentLeveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Discussion, Dissemination, Applications10.1007/978-3-319-47169-3_47(609-625)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2016
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47169-3_47
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF Chinese translation

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Digital Edition

View this article in digital edition.

Digital Edition

Magazine Site

View this article on the magazine site (external)

Magazine Site

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Abstract

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Web applications testing techniques: a systematic mapping study

Coverage Criteria for State-Based Testing: A Systematic Review