Effective test generation and adequacy assessment for JavaScript-based web applications

Abstract

Modern web applications rely heavily on JavaScript and client-side runtime manipulation of the DOM (Document Object Model) tree. However, JavaScript is loosely typed, dynamic, and challenging to analyze and test. We propose an automated technique to generate regression test cases at two complementary levels: (1) individual JavaScript functions, and (2) DOM event sequences. Moreover, to assess the quality of the test cases we propose a mutation testing technique that leverages static and dynamic program analysis to guide the mutation generation process towards parts of the code that are error-prone or likely to influence the program's output.