The Infona portal uses cookies, i.e. strings of text saved by a browser on the user's device. The portal can access those files and use them to remember the user's data, such as their chosen settings (screen view, interface language, etc.), or their login data. By using the Infona portal the user accepts automatic saving and using this information for portal operation purposes. More information on the subject can be found in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. By closing this window the user confirms that they have read the information on cookie usage, and they accept the privacy policy and the way cookies are used by the portal. You can change the cookie settings in your browser.
Web applications pervade our life, being crucial for a multitude of economic, social and educational activities. For this reason, their quality has become a top-priority problem. End-to-End testing aims at improving the quality of a web application by exercising it as a whole, and by adopting its requirements specification as a reference for the expected behaviour. In this paper, we outline a novel...
The difficulty of creating a test suite before developing a web application is the main barrier to the adoption of the Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) paradigm. In this work, we present a general lightweight approach and a specific instantiation based on existing tools for acceptance test driven development of web applications. The idea, which is the basis of our approach, is simple: using...
Page Object is a design pattern aimed at making web test scripts more readable, robust and maintainable. The effort to manually create the page objects needed for a web application may be substantial and unfortunately existing tools do not help web developers in such task.In this paper we present APOGEN, a tool for the automatic generation of page objects for web applications. Our tool automatically...
Test scripts used for web testing rely on DOM locators, often expressed as XPaths, to identify the active web page elements and the web page data to be used in assertions. When the web application evolves, the major cost incurred for the evolution of the test scripts is due to broken locators, which fail to locate the target element in the new version of the software. We formulate the problem of automatically...
The main reason for the fragility of web test cases is the inability of web element locators to work correctly when the web page DOM evolves. Web elements locators are used in web test cases to identify all the GUI objects to operate upon and eventually to retrieve web page content that is compared against some oracle in order to decide whether the test case has passed or not. Hence, web element locators...
UML Activity diagrams offer a very large set of constructs, however many of them seem scarcely used or even their existence is not known. Here, we present a precise view of the usage levels of these constructs by means of a survey, covering preliminarily books, courses, tutorials, and tools about UML. Results show that, among the 47 Activity diagrams constructs, a large majority of them seem to be...
In the context of web regression testing, the main aging factor for a test suite is related to the continuous evolution of the underlying web application that makes the test cases broken. This rapid decay forces the quality experts to evolve the test ware. One of the major costs of test case evolution is due to the manual effort necessary to repair broken web page element locators. Locators are lines...
Automated testing of web applications reduces the effort needed in manual testing. Old 1st generation tools, based on screen coordinates, produce quite fragile test suites, tightly coupled with the specific screen resolution, window position and size experienced during test case recording. These tools have been replaced by a 2nd generation of tools, which offer easy selection and interaction with...
In this paper we sketch a novel method for writing requirements specifications that enriches disciplined use cases with screen mock-ups. Disciplined use cases are characterized by a quite stringent template, strongly structuring also the form of the scenarios' steps (e.g., The subject of each step must be explicit). That structuring allows to impose further constraints helping to prevent common mistakes...
There are several approaches for automated functional 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. In this paper, we present an empirical cost/benefit analysis of two different categories of automated functional web testing approaches: (1) capture-replay web testing (in particular, using...
This paper reports the results and some challenges we discovered during the design and execution of a pilot experiment with 21 bachelor students aimed at investigating the effect of documentation accuracy during software maintenance and evolution activities. As documentation we considered: a high level system functionality description and UML documents. Preliminary results indicate a benefit of +15%...
There is empirical evidence supporting the usefulness of screen mockups in improving the comprehension of use cases. Though a cost-benefit analysis would require an estimate of the effort required to produce them. In this paper, we present an empirical study with students and professionals to estimate the effort to develop mockups starting from use cases. We adopted Step Wise Linear Regression to...
Despite their importance in any empirically based research program, industrial surveys are not very common in the software engineering literature. In our experience, a possible reason is their difficulty of publication. We would like to understand what are the issues that may prevent the publication of papers reporting industrial surveys. In this preliminary work, we analyzed the surveys we conducted...
In this poster, we sketch our research plan about a “massive” empirical evaluation of model-driven techniques following the first two already conducted steps in that respect (an exploratory survey and a series of controlled experiments concerning maintainability). We intend to experiment UML-based model-driven techniques in several contexts (e.g., desktop and Web applications), focusing on several...
The page object pattern is used in the context of web testing for abstracting the application's web pages in order to reduce the coupling between test cases and application under test. This paper reports on an industrial case study in a small Italian company (eXact learning solutions S.p.A.) investigating the potential benefits of adopting the page object pattern to improve the maintainability of...
This poster presents an industrial case study about test automation and test suite maintenance in the context of Web applications. The Web application under test is a Learning Content Management System (eXact learning LCMS). We analysed the costs associated with the realignment of four equivalent Selenium WebDriver test suites, implemented using the page object pattern and different methods to locate...
Matching algorithms play a fundamental role in many important but difficult software engineering activities, especially design evolution analysis and model comparison. We present MADMatch, a fast and scalable many-to-many approximate diagram matching approach based on an error-tolerant graph matching (ETGM) formulation. Diagrams are represented as graphs, costs are assigned to possible differences...
Developing SOA based systems and migrating legacy systems to SOA are difficult and error prone tasks, where approaches, methods and tools play a fundamental role. For this reason, several proposals have been brought forward in literature to help SOA developers.
The main aim of this work is investigating the level of knowledge and diffusion of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) in the Italian industry. We are also interested to understand what is the trend of SOA (positive or negative?) and what are the methods, technologies and tools really used in the industry.
We conducted a personal opinion survey in two rounds — years 2008 and 2011 — with the aim of investigating the level of knowledge and adoption of SOA in the Italian industry. We are also interested in understanding what is the trend of SOA (positive or negative?) and what are the methods, technologies and tools really used in the industry. The main findings of this survey are the following: (1) SOA...
Set the date range to filter the displayed results. You can set a starting date, ending date or both. You can enter the dates manually or choose them from the calendar.