Multi-Objective Test Case Generation For Web Applications With Limited Resources

With the development of web technology,web applications are becoming more complicated and diverse,which leads to the onerous work for ensuring the correctness of web applications.Software testing is a kind of important technique for checking the correctness of web applications.However,full testing usually needs a lot of resources.How to do effective web application testing with limited time and resources is a big challenge.Evaluating the importance of a web application’s page nodes and testing the important nodes first is a workable solution for that.However,the existing methods only consider the content importance and out-in-degree of a web application’s page nodes,which is on the view of static and local,lacks the consideration of dynamic execution process and the overall topology structure.Thus,the evaluation of important nodes is not accurate enough.Web applications contain a large number of interaction events with users.The dynamic information of events’ executing process is very important.At the same time,whether the nodes are in the key position of information transmission in the topology structure of the whole model is also very important.All the above factors should be taken into consideration when evaluating the importance of the nodes.As different factors play different roles when influencing the importance of nodes,this study uses the multi-attribute decision-making method to do fusing calculation to get the comprehensive importance values that can reflect the importance degree of nodes more accurately.When generating test cases,only considering the comprehensive importance will cause the resulting test case set to have low coverage percentage of the model.Therefore,this study introduces high diversity as another object on the basis of testing important nodes first,to increase the effectiveness of the test case set,and finally proposes a multi-objective test case generation method based on comprehensive importance and diversity.To evaluate the effectiveness of the method and to determine the most suitable test case generation algorithm,six web applications were used as the subjects.Using GA and NSGA2 algorithms with our method,the results show that the idea of our method performs better when doing the multi-objective test case generation based on comprehensive importance and diversity.It can ensure the quality of the test case set and also the nodes with higher importance degrees be tested first.