Rich Internet Application Testing Using Execution Trace Data

Abstract

The rapid and growing diffusion of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) with their enhanced interactivity, responsiveness and dynamicity is sharpening the distance between Web applications and desktop applications, making the Web experience more and more appealing and user-friendly. This paper presents a technique for testing RIAs that generates test cases from application execution traces, and obtains more scalable test suites thanks to testing reduction techniques. Execution traces provide a fast and cheap way for generating test cases and can be obtained either from user sessions, or by crawling the application or by combining both approaches. The proposed technique has been evaluated by a preliminary experiment that investigated the effectiveness of different approaches for execution trace collection and of several criteria for reducing the test suites. The experimental results showed the feasibility of the technique and that its effectiveness can be improved by hybrid approaches that combine both manually and automatically obtained execution traces of the application.