Automated replay and failure detection for web applications

Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Sreedevi Sampath, Lori Pollock
2005 Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM international Conference on Automated software engineering - ASE '05  
User-session-based testing of web applications gathers user sessions to create and continually update test suites based on real user input in the field. To support this approach during maintenance and beta testing phases, we have built an automated framework for testing web-based software that focuses on scalability and evolving the test suite automatically as the application's operational profile changes. This paper reports on the automation of the replay and oracle components for web
more » ... ons, which pose issues beyond those in the equivalent testing steps for traditional, stand-alone applications. Concurrency, nondeterminism, dependence on persistent state and previous user sessions, a complex application infrastructure, and a large number of output formats necessitate developing different replay and oracle comparator operators, which have tradeoffs in fault detection effectiveness, precision of analysis, and efficiency. We have designed, implemented, and evaluated a set of automated replay techniques and oracle comparators for user-session-based testing of web applications. This paper describes the issues, algorithms, heuristics, and an experimental case study with user sessions for two web applications. From our results, we conclude that testers performing user-session-based testing should consider their expectations for program coverage and fault detection when choosing a replay and oracle technique.
doi:10.1145/1101908.1101947 dblp:conf/kbse/SprenkleGSP05 fatcat:cpz2awdrmjf5lid3hte3vy6u6a