A case study-based comparison of web testing techniques applied to AJAX web applications

Asynchronous Javascript And XML (AJAX) is a recent technology used to develop rich and dynamic Web applications. Different from traditional Web applications, AJAX applications consist of a single page whose elements are updated dynamically in response to callbacks activated asynchronously by the user or by a server message. On the one hand, AJAX improves the responsiveness and usability of a Web application, but on the other hand, it makes the testing phase more difficult. In this paper, our state-based testing technique, developed to test AJAX-based applications, is compared to existing Web testing techniques, such as white-box and black-box ones. To this aim, an experiment based on two case studies has been conducted to evaluate effectiveness and test effort involved in the compared Web testing techniques. In particular, the capability of each technique to reveal injected faults of different fault categories is analyzed in detail. The associated effort was also measured. The results show that state-based testing is complementary to the existing Web testing techniques and can reveal faults otherwise unnoticed or hard to reveal with the other techniques.