Facilitating the generation of QuickCheck models for web test automation

Abstract

In this modern age, more companies are making the switch to web-based system. Competition on the web is extremely high with users expecting a highly reliable and robust service; therefore any perception of low quality can lead to users switching to a competing service. Producing high quality systems, while still remaining within tight time constrains is essential for businesses to succeed. Frequent changes in the requirements due to advances in technology, unpredictable control of execution and other dynamic factors contribute to an increase in the overall complexity of web-based systems. Current adopted testing methods are very time consuming and can be quite costly, while business stakeholders should have more influence during the testing process to achieve better results. This project adopts an existing model-based testing tool called QuickCheck, for use with web-applications. Behavioural specifications which are known for being easy to write and understand, are used to define a modelling language that can bridge the gap between business specifications and more formal modelling notation, to allow business owners to be more involved in the overall testing process. QuickCheck models are automatically constructed from the defined modelling language, and are used to automatically generate and executes test case with the help of Selenium WebDriver. The Government of Malta's eHealth solution, myHealth, is used as a case study to evaluate the proposed automated testing process. myHealth was designed to handle over 2000 registered doctors and a population of around 400,000 citizens. The results show that the modelling language produced a high expressivity ratio (90%) of the current system, covering almost 753 of test cases generated manually. Although overheads are introduced to automate the execution of test cases, the actual execution is faster when compared to executing test cases manually.