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Lowering the barriers to website testing with CoTester

Published: 07 February 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we present CoTester, a system designed to decrease the difficulty of testing web applications. CoTester allows testers to create test scripts that are represented in an easy-to-understand scripting language rather than a complex programming language, which allows tests to be created rapidly and by non-developers. CoTester improves the management of test scripts by grouping sequences of lowlevel actions into subroutines, such as "log in" or "check out shopping cart", which help testers visualize test structure and make bulk modifications. A key innovation in CoTester is its ability to automatically identify these subroutines using a machine learning algorithm. Our algorithm is able to achieve 91% accuracy at recognizing a set of 7 representative subroutines commonly found in test scripts.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IUI '10: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
      February 2010
      460 pages
      ISBN:9781605585154
      DOI:10.1145/1719970
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 07 February 2010

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      Author Tags

      1. instruction
      2. subroutine
      3. test script
      4. website testing

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      View all
      • (2020)Clustering test steps in natural language toward automating test automationProceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3368089.3417067(1285-1295)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
      • (2018)RousillonProceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3242587.3242661(963-975)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
      • (2017)Skip blocks: reusing execution history to accelerate web scriptsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31338751:OOPSLA(1-28)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2017
      • (2015)Automated modularization of GUI test casesProceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 110.5555/2818754.2818763(44-54)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
      • (2015)Automated Modularization of GUI Test Cases2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2015.27(44-54)Online publication date: May-2015
      • (2014)Software services: a research roadmapFuture of Software Engineering Proceedings10.1145/2593882.2593892(40-54)Online publication date: 31-May-2014
      • (2014)Appstrument - A Unified App Instrumentation and Automated Playback Framework for Testing Mobile ApplicationsMobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking, and Services10.1007/978-3-319-11569-6_37(474-486)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2014
      • (2013)LiveActionACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems10.1145/2533670.25336723:3(1-23)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2013
      • (2013)Improving rich internet application development using patternsProceedings of the companion publication of the 2013 international conference on Intelligent user interfaces companion10.1145/2451176.2451204(69-70)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2013
      • (2012)Automating test automationProceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering10.5555/2337223.2337327(881-891)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2012
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