Automatic Detection of Potential Layout Faults Following Changes to Responsive Web Pages (N)
Thomas A. Walsh, Phil McMinn, Gregory M. Kapfhammer · 2015
Due to the exponential increase in the number ofmobile devices being used to access the World Wide Web, it iscrucial that Web sites are functional and user-friendly across awide range of Web-enabled devices. This necessity has resulted in the introduction of responsive Web design (RWD), which usescomplex cascading style sheets (CSS) to fluidly modify a Web site's appearance depending on the viewport width of the device in use. Although existing tools may support the testing of responsive Web sites, they are time consuming and error-prone to use because theyrequire manual screenshot inspection at specified viewport widths. Addressing these concerns, this paper presents a method thatcan automatically detect potential layout faults in responsively designed Web sites. To experimentally evaluate this approach, weimplemented it as a tool, called ReDeCheck, and applied itto 5 real-world web sites that vary in both their approach toresponsive design and their complexity. The experiments revealthat ReDeCheck finds 91% of the inserted layout faults.