Introducing software testing in an SME : An investigation of software testing in a web application

Abstract: Quality assurance and software testing of software artifacts is as important as ever and this is especially so the case in web applications. The web applications of today are more complex and are used in more critical systems at a larger scale than ever before. However, testing of these applications is very challenging due to their dynamic nature. It is somewhat challenging to find clear and up-to-date guidelines on how to implement and evaluate regression software testing in small and medium-size enterprises (SME’s) developing web applications. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the problem at hand and propose an approach to implementing software regression testing in web applications for SME’s. That is, recommending what to test, recommending what kind of software testing could be implemented and using what state of the art front end testing frameworks. An in-depth literature study was conducted to see what had been done in the past and present. Two rounds of semi structured in-depth interviews were conducted with software developers at the company where this thesis was conducted. The main purpose of the first interview was to find business goals from which to derive and subsequently create a testing suite in four different testing frameworks; Cypress, Jest, Playwright and Vitest. The purpose of the second interview was to evaluate and compare the aforementioned testing suites in order to propose an approach on software testing in web applications. In addition, code coverage and mutation scoring was also considered when evaluating the testing suites. The findings of this thesis is that a reasonable approach of introducing software testing into an SME which develops a web application, is to use business requirements for generating test cases and prioritizing end-to-end testing since the perceived benefits of the latter in this thesis far outweigh the benefits of the component testing suites although a combination of both would be the best of both worlds. Although this thesis was conducted on a web application written in React, the findings and recommendations can be applied to any front end framework such as Angular or Vue.