Web application testing—Challenges and opportunities

Context:

A large part of the software produced by many companies and organizations today are web applications. Testing web applications is vital to ensure and maintain the quality of these systems. They play an important role in promoting brands and enabling better communication with customers.

Objective:

There is a gap in existing literature research in recent years regarding testing of web applications, although the landscape of web applications techniques has changed. New methods, frameworks, environments and techniques have recently been used both for developing and testing these applications. This paper presents an overview of the research directions, problems and challenges in the field of Web application testing in the last decade. Our paper investigates current implementation and validation techniques, the quality of existing approaches and reveals areas of incomplete or superficial research.

Methods:

In this paper, a systematic literature review about the state of web application testing has been conducted. Based on initially about 6000 papers, that were extracted from Science Direct, Springer Link, WebOfScience, IEEE Explore and ACM, we used a final number of 72 papers after a filtration process for this literature review. The extracted papers were examined for demographics, problems, techniques and tools. We looked at the quality, the empirical evidence and the test application used for validating the different methods in the extracted papers.

Results:

The most important journals, authors, tools and research directions in this field are discovered, a deep analysis of quality, rigor and empirical evidence is given, and the most important validation applications are described. We found that three groups of authors contributed to more than 25% of the papers, the three most important journals published more than 50% of the papers. 30% of the developed tools were open accessible. Most papers had a good description of study design and threats for validity, but have little industrial relevance. Only 6 papers validated on industrial applications. Only 40% of these papers compared their technique with other existing techniques, and applications used for validation are usually outdated.

Conclusions:

We discuss trends and challenges in research in web application testing. We also show gaps in research and areas that need more attention from the research community. Research in web application testing needs more focus on industrial relevance and scalability to analyze the usability for industry. New techniques should be validated on modern test application frameworks to get comparable results. The results can help researchers to get an overview of publication venues, active researchers, current research gaps and problems in the field.