A Survey on Web Application Testing: A Decade of Evolution

2024-12-13

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Web application testing (WAT) faces fundamental challenges including dynamic content, asynchronous interactions, and cross-environment compatibility. This paper presents a systematic literature review of WAT research from 2014 to 2024. Methodologically, it introduces the first comprehensive taxonomy—categorizing approaches into model-based, crawler-based, AI-driven, and security-oriented testing—and conducts a longitudinal comparative analysis. Integrating bibliometric analysis, methodological synthesis, and empirical evaluation of widely adopted tools, it constructs a decade-long evolutionary map of WAT. Furthermore, the work proposes a standardized evaluation framework and identifies key open problems, notably asynchronous behavior modeling and cross-platform reliability validation. The contributions provide an authoritative, evidence-based reference for industrial tool selection and academic research direction setting, bridging practice and theory in modern WAT.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Knowledge Acquisition from the Web
• Application Domains: Web
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web measurements

Abstract

As one of the most popular software applications, a web application is a program, accessible through the web, to dynamically generate content based on user interactions or contextual data, for example, online shopping platforms, social networking sites, and financial services. Web applications operate in diverse environments and leverage web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax, often incorporating features like asynchronous operations to enhance user experience. Due to the increasing user and popularity of web applications, approaches to their quality have become increasingly important. Web Application Testing (WAT) plays a vital role in ensuring web applications' functionality, security, and reliability. Given the speed with which web technologies are evolving, WAT is especially important. Over the last decade, various WAT approaches have been developed. The diversity of approaches reflects the many aspects of web applications, such as dynamic content, asynchronous operations, and diverse user environments. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the main achievements during the past decade: It examines the main steps involved in WAT, including test-case generation and execution, and evaluation and assessment. The currently available tools for WAT are also examined. The paper also discusses some open research challenges and potential future WAT work.

Problem

• Surveying evolution of web application testing over a decade
• Examining test-case generation, execution, and evaluation methods
• Identifying open challenges and future directions in WAT

Innovation

• Survey on diverse Web Application Testing approaches
• Examines test-case generation, execution, and evaluation
• Reviews available tools and future research challenges