End to End Specification based Test Generation of Web Applications
Khusbu Bubna · 2016
Using formal specifications to generate test cases presents great potential for automation in testing and enhancing the quality of test cases. However, an important challenge in this direction is the design specifications which are at a more abstract level than the implementation, with many important implementation level details missing. To generate executable test cases, these implementation details must be included at some stage. Though there has been a lot of work in test generation from specification, all the existing methods suffer from this problem: either the test cases are not executable, or the process involves a non-trivial, manual step of translating the abstract test cases to concrete test cases. In this work, we present an approach of specification based test generation for web applications that overcomes the above challenge: test generation is completely automated and the test cases are fully executable on a test execution framework (e.g. Selenium RC). Further, our methodology allows generation of multiple sets of concrete test cases from the the same formal specification. This makes it possible to use the same abstract specification to generate test cases for a number of versions of the system. Throughout the paper, a case study of Learning Management System is used to illustrate our approach.