Specification Based Integration Testing of Web Applications

Implementation for Specification Based Integration Testing of Web Applications   . 

Web applications today rely heavily on complex RESTful APIs,
where subtle inconsistencies between implementation and specifi-
cation can lead to critical failures. Many of these ‘business logic’
related defects reside in sequences of complex client side opera-
tions, often interleaved with potentially multiple server-side calls.
Such defects are very difficult to uncover through tests focused on
unit-testing of REST endpoints. Existing testing methods focus on
individual interactions, either at the UI level or at the server-side,
rarely paying attention to a sequence of interactions. This paper
presents a specification-based framework for automated generation
of tests for web applications. Our framework uses two inputs: a
specification for the REST API written in a formal specification
language that we introduce in this paper, and test paths derived
(automatically) from web-clients modelled using Statechart. It then
derives test cases that exercise complex test paths through the client
model involving multiple interactions with a stateful server. Our
experiments demonstrate that our framework can successfully gen-
erate realistic, executable test cases potentially involving multiple
API-calls which existing state-of-the-art test generation techniques
struggle to generate