Generating Feature Usage Scenarios in Client-Side Web Applications

摘要

Client-side web applications are highly-dynamic event-driven GUI applications where the majority of code is executed as a response to user-generated events. Many software engineering activities (e.g. testing) require sequences of actions (i.e. usage scenarios) that execute the application code with high coverage. Specifying these usage scenarios is a difficult and time-consuming activity. This is especially true when generating usage scenarios for a particular feature because it requires in-depth knowledge of application behavior and understanding of the underlying implementation. In this paper we present a method for automatic generation of feature usage scenarios. The method is based on dynamic analysis and systematic exploration of the application's event and value space. We have evaluated the approach in a case study, and the evaluation shows that the method is capable of identifying usage scenarios for a particular feature. We have also performed the evaluation on a suite of web applications, and the results show that an increase in coverage can be achieved, when compared to the initial coverage obtained by loading the page and executing registered events.