A case study of automatically creating test suites from web application field data

Abstract

Creating effective test cases is a difficult problem, especially for web applications. To comprehensively test a web application's functionality, test cases must test complex application state dependencies and concurrent user interactions. Rather than creating test cases manually or from a static model, field data provides an inexpensive alternative to creating such sophisticated test cases. An existing approach to using field data in testing web applications is user-session-based testing. Previous user-session-based testing approaches ignore state dependences from multi-user interactions. In this paper, we propose strategies for leveraging web application field data to automatically create test cases that test various levels of multi-user interaction and state dependencies. Results from out preliminary case study of a publicly deployed web application show that these test case creation mechanisms are a promising testing strategy for web applications.