Guided test generation for web applications

We focus on functional testing of enterprise applications with the goal of exercising an application´s interesting behaviors by driving it from its user interface. The difficulty in doing this is focusing on the interesting behaviors among an unbounded number of behaviors. We present a new technique for automatically generating tests that drive a web-based application along interesting behaviors, where the interesting behavior is specified in the form of “business rules.” Business rules are a general mechanism for describing business logic, access control, or even navigational properties of an application´s GUI. Our technique is black box, in that it does not analyze the application´s server-side implementation, but relies on directed crawling via the application´s GUI. To handle the unbounded number of GUI states, the technique includes two phases. Phase 1 creates an abstract state-transition diagram using a relaxed notion of equivalence of GUI states without considering rules. Next, Phase 2 identifies rule-relevant abstract paths and refines those paths using a stricter notion of state equivalence. Our technique can be much more effective at covering business rules than an undirected technique, developed as an enhancement of an existing test-generation technique. Our experiments showed that the former was able to cover 92% of the rules, compared to 52% of the rules covered by the latter.