A Search-Based Approach for Robustness Testing of Web Applications

Abstract: Context: This thesis deals with the robustness testing of web applications on a different web browser using a Selenium WebDriver to automate the browser. To increase the efficiency of this automation testing, we are using a robustness method. Robustness method is a process of testing the behaviour of a system implementation under exceptional execution conditions to check if it still fulfils some robustness requirements. These robustness tests often apply random algorithms to select the actions to be executed on web applications. The search-based technique was used to automatically generate effective test cases, consisting of initial conditions and fault sequences. The success criteria in most cases: "if it does not crash or hang application, then it is robust". Problem: Software testing consumes a lot of time, labour-intensive to write test cases and expensive in a software development life cycle. There was always a need for software testing to decrease the testing time. Manual testing requires a lot of effort and hard work if we measure in terms of person per month [1]. To overcome this problem, we are using a search-based approach for robustness testing of web applications which can dramatically reduce the human effort, time and the costs related to testing. Objective: The purpose of this thesis is to develop an automated approach to carry out robustness testing of web applications focusing on revealing defects related to a sequence of events triggered by a web system. To do so, we will employ search-based techniques (e.g., NSGA-II algorithm [1]). The main focus is on Ericsson Digital BSS systems, with a special focus on robustness testing. The main purpose of this master thesis is to investigate how automated robustness testing can be done so that the effort of keeping the tests up to date is minimized when the functionality of the application changes. This kind of automation testing is well depended on the structure of the product being tested. In this thesis, the test object was structured in a way, which made the testing method simple for fault revelation and less time-consuming. Method: For this approach, a meta-heuristic search-based genetic algorithm is used to make efficiency for robustness testing of the web application. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this proposed approach, the experimental procedure is adapted. For this, an experimental testbed is set up. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is measured by two objectives: Fault revelation, Test sequence length. The effectiveness is also measured by evaluating the feasible cost-effective output test cases. i Results:The results we collected from our approach shows that by reducing the test sequence length we can reduce the time consuming and by using the NSGA-2 algorithm we found as many faults as we can when we tested on web applications in Ericsson. Conclusion: The attempt of testing of web applications, was partly succeeded. This kind of robustness testing in our approach was strongly depended on the algorithm we are using. We can conclude that by using these two objectives, we can reduce the cost of testing and time consuming.