Root cause analysis for HTML presentation failures using search-based techniques

Abstract

Presentation failures in web applications can negatively impact users' perception of the application's quality and its usability. Such failures are challenging to diagnose and correct since the user interfaces of modern web applications are defined by a complex interaction between HTML tags and their visual properties defined by CSS and HTML attributes. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for automatically identifying the root cause of presentation failures in web applications that uses image processing and search based techniques. In an experiment conducted for assessing the accuracy of our approach, we found that it was able to identify the correct root cause with 100% accuracy.