The heterogeneous structure and dynamic nature of web applications have made the testing procedure a challenge. Producing high-quality web applications can be performed by conducting appropriate testing techniques. As a result, several white-box and session-based testing techniques have been proposed in the literature. In this work, the performance and effectiveness of these testing techniques are evaluated in terms of fault detection on a simulated PHP online bookstore. The testing techniques are examined with the use of PHPUnit, xDebug and Selenium automated testing tools. We believe that combining the testing techniques with appropriate automated testing tools (PHPUnit and Selenium) can be effective in terms of fault detection and time spent to construct and run test cases on PHP web applications. The results show that some testing techniques are preferred. We also identify categories of faults that are amenable to detection by each of the techniques, as well as categories of faults that are difficult to detect by any of the techniques. Moreover, using the automated tools has helped in automating the conduct of the tests and in reducing the time required to perform them. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Traditional test oracles have two problems. Firstly, several test oracles are needed for a single software program to perform different functions and maintaining a large number of test oracles is tedious and might be prone to errors. Secondly, testers usually test only the important criteria of a web application, since its time consuming to check with all the possible criteria. Ontologies have been used in a wide variety of domains and they have also been used in software testing. However, they have not been used for test oracle automation. The main idea of this thesis is to define a procedure for how ontology-based test oracle automation can be achieved for testing web applications and minimize the problems of traditional test oracles. The proposed procedure consists of the following steps: first, the expected results are stored in ontology A by running previous working version of the web application; second, the actual results are stored in ontology B by running the web application under test at runtime; and finally, the results of both ontology A and B are compared. This results in an automated test oracle comparator. Evaluation includes how the proposed procedure minimizes the traditional test oracle problems and by identifying the benefits of the defined procedure.

Modern software applications need to run on a variety of web and mobile platforms with diverse software and hardware-level features. Thus, developers of such software need to duplicate the testing and maintenance effort on a wide range of platforms. Often developers are not able to cope with this increasing demand and release software that is broken on certain platforms, thereby affecting a class of customers using such platforms. Hence, there is a need for automating such duplicate activities to assist the developer in coping with the ever increasing demand. The goal of my work is to improve the testing and maintenance of cross-platform web and mobile applications by developing automated techniques for comparing and matching the behavior of such applications across different platforms. To achieve this goal, I have identified three problems that are relevant in the context of cross-platform testing and maintenance: 1) automated identification of inconsistencies in the same application's behavior across multiple platforms, 2) detecting features that are present in the application on one platform, but missing on another platform version of the same application, and, 3) automated migration of test suites and possibly other software artifacts across platforms. I present three different scenarios for the development of {cross-platform} web and mobile applications, and formulate each of the three problems in the scenario where it is most relevant. To address and mitigate these problems in their corresponding scenarios, I present the principled design, development and evaluation of the two techniques, and a third preliminary technique to highlight the research challenges of test migration. The first technique, X-pert identifies inconsistencies in a web application running on multiple web browsers. The second technique, FMAP matches features between the desktop and mobile versions of a web application and reports any features found missing on either of the platform versions. The final technique, MigraTest attempts to automatically migrate test cases from a mobile application on one platform to its counterpart on another platform. To evaluate these techniques, I implemented them as prototype tools and ran these tools on real-world subject applications. The empirical evaluation of X-pert shows that it is accurate and effective in detecting real-world inconsistencies in web applications. In the case of FMAP, the results of my evaluation show that it was able to correctly identify missing features between desktop and mobile versions of the web applications considered, as confirmed by my analysis of user reports and software fixes for these applications. The third technique, MigraTest was able to efficiently migrate test cases between two mobile platform versions of the subject applications.

This thesis presents an extensive survey of 100,000 websites as the basis for understanding the deployment of cookies across the Internet. The survey indicates cookie deployment on the Internet is approaching universal levels. The survey identifies the presence of P3P policies and dynamic web technologies as major predictors of cookie usage, and a number of significant relationships are established between the origin of the web application and cookie deployment. Large associations are identified between third-party persistent cookie usage and a countrys e-business environment. Cookie collection testing (CCT), a strategy for testing web applications, is presented. Cookies maintained in a browser are explored in light of anti random testing techniques, culminating in the definition of seeding vectors as the basis for a scalable test suite. Essentially CCT seeks to verify web application robustness against the modificationintentional or otherwiseof an application's internal state variables. Automation of CCT is outlined through the definition of test oracles and evaluation criterion. Evolutionary adaptive random (eAR) testing is proposed for application to the cookie collection testing strategy. A simulation study is undertaken to evaluate eAR against the current state-of-the-art in adaptive random testingfixed size candidate set, restricted random testing, quasi-random testing, and random testing. eAR is demonstrated to be superior to the other techniques for block pattern simulations. For fault patterns of increased complexity, eAR is shown to be comparable to the other methods. An empirical investigation of CCT is undertaken. CCT is demonstrated to reveal defects within web applications, and is found to have a substantial fault-triggering rate. Furthermore, CCT is demonstrated to interact with the underlying application, not just the technological platform upon which an application is implemented. Both seeding and generated vectors are found to be useful in triggering defects. A synergetic relationship is found to exist between the seeding and generated vectors with respect to distinct fault detection. Finally, a large significant relationship is established between structural and content similarity measures of web application responses, with a composite of the two similarity measures observed to be superior in the detection of faults. / Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems

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