Abstract

User-session-based testing which relies on capturing and replaying real user sessions is an effective approach to test web applications. However, as a black-box testing, test case generation totally based on user session data may not be qualified for ensuring the reliability of web applications. This paper proposed an approach in terms of gray-box testing, combining user session data with request dependence graph of web application, to generate test cases automatically. A model of RDG was first constructed according to the structural analysis of the application under test; and then transition relations between pages and requests were extracted based on the request dependence graph. Finally, a reasonable test suite was generated to cover as many fault sensitive transition relations as possible with the aid of genetic algorithm. Simulation results indicated that our approach was better than the traditional user-session-based testing, in that it attained a higher path coverage and fault detection rate within small size of the test suite.

Key words: Web application testing, automatic test case generation, user session, request dependence graph, genetic algorithm.