An Interaction-Based Test Sequence Generation Approach for Testing Web Applications

Web applications often use dynamic pages that interact with each other by accessing shared objects, e.g., session objects. Interactions between dynamic pages need to be carefully tested, as they may give rise to subtle faults that cannot be detected by testing individual pages in isolation. Since it is impractical to test all possible interactions, a trade-off must be made between test coverage (in terms of number of interactions covered in the tests) and test effort. In this paper, we present a test sequence generation approach to cover all pairwise interactions, i.e., interactions between any two pages. Intuitively, if a page P could reach another page Ppsila, there must exist a test sequence in which both P and Ppsila are visited in the given order. We report a test sequence generation algorithm and two case studies in which test sequences are generated to achieve pairwise interaction coverage for two Web applications. The empirical results indicate that our approach achieves good code coverage and is effective for detecting interaction faults in the subject applications.