Finding HTML presentation failures using image comparison techniques

Abstract

Presentation failures in web applications can negatively affect an application's usability and user experience. To find such failures, testers must visually inspect the output of a web application or exhaustively specify invariants to automatically check a page's correctness. This makes finding presentation failures labor intensive and error prone. In this paper, we present a new automated approach for detecting and localizing presentation failures in web pages. To detect presentation failures, our approach uses image processing techniques to compare a web page and its oracle. Then, to localize the failures, our approach analyzes the page with respect to its visual layout and identifies the HTML elements likely to be responsible for the failure. We evaluated our approach on a set of real-world web applications and found that the approach was able to accurately detect failures and identify the faulty HTML elements.