Regression based automated test tool for web portals

Abstract

As more and more services and information are made available over the Internet and Intranet, web portals are gaining in popularity and have become extraordinarily complex to test for their functionality. These web portals usually have thousands of hyper links, images, multimedia files, data files, audio files among many others. Web pages are modified frequently viz. adding links, making user specific customizations, adding new features and many other functionalities. Many a times these consist of hundreds of files of different types to be navigated by the users. Due to this, conventional software testing methods and tools are not adequate for these Web portals. In this paper, we propose an automated test tool which will test such a web portal for all the missing links, file type mismatches, unreachable files etc. It also reports errors in Java Script and PHP modules embedded in the HTML documents. The tool will have a dry run to identify all these features and will generate a complete report regarding the web portal for the ease of maintenance. This tool is supposed to work on both static and dynamic web pages. Dynamic content include filling up the forms, entering login information etc. This tool generates test cases for running over the web portal which uses regression testing techniques. It also provides GUI for easy interaction with the portal. The methodology used includes the Global Data Flow Analysis, use-definition chains, construction of Control Flow Graph and Regression Testing.