Approaches and Tools for Automated End-to-End Web Testing

The importance of test automation in web engineering comes from the widespread use of web applications and the associated demand for code quality. Test automation is considered crucial for delivering the quality levels expected by users, since it can save a lot of time in testing and it helps developers to release web applications with fewer defects. The main advantage of test automation comes from fast, unattended execution of a set of tests after some changes have been made to a web application. Moreover, modern web applications adopt a multitier architecture where the implementation is scattered across different layers and run on different machines. For this reason, end-to-end testing techniques are required to test the overall behavior of web applications. In the last years, several approaches have been proposed for automated end-to-end web testing and the choice among them depends on a number of factors, including the tools used for web testing and the costs associated with their adoption. They can be classified using two main criteria: the first concerns how test cases are developed (ie, Capture-Replay and Programmable approaches), while, the second concerns how test cases localize the web elements to interact with (ie, Coordinates-based, DOM-based, and Visual approaches), that is what kind of locators are used for selecting the target GUI components. For developers and project managers it is not easy to select the most suitable automated end-to-end web testing approach for their needs among the existing ones. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the automated end-to-end web testing approaches and summarizes the findings of a long term research project aimed at empirically investigating their strengths and weaknesses.