Web Traversal with a History Stack

Correct navigational behavior of a web application is essential to its reliability. An effective means to improve our confidence in the correct behavior of a web application is to test it by exploring the possible navigation among the webpages at client side: The tester carries out the testing by consecutively clicking the hyperlinks along with some possible search parameters and checking whether the returned webpages are as expected. This type of client-side testing can be viewed as a traverse in a graph representing the considered webpages together with the hyperlinks among them. To reach an efficient test that traverses all hyperlinks considered, we make use of the interface provided by web browsers, typically, the goto menu. In doing so, the issues raised by cookies and URL rewriting are taken into account. Compared to the case without using the interface of web browsers, our experiments show a 17%-24% saving on the test sequence lengths in most cases.