RICCA F.

Modern web applications require long quality assurance sessions to be appreciated by users. Test automation reduces delivery times but requires the development of effective and maintainable test scripts so that the advantages of its use are not lost. The usage of the Page object (PO) pattern has proven to be very effective in GUI testing,...

This paper provides the results of a survey of the grey literature concerning best practices for end-to-end web test automation. We analyzed more than 2,400 sources (e.g., blog posts, white-papers, user manuals, GitHub repositories) looking for guidelines by IT professionals on how to develop and maintain web test code. Ultimately, we filtered...

The recent technological advancements has pointed the interest of developers, researchers, and end-users towards the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, whose plethora of services naturally arises to improve the human life. As the IoT becomes more and more involved in our everyday activities, we are personally encouraged to experiment it in...

Mutation testing is an important technique able to evaluate the bug-detection effectiveness of existing software test suites. Mutation testing tools exist for several languages, e.g., Java and JavaScript, but no solutions are available for managing the mutation testing process for entire web applications, in the context of end-to-end (E2E) web...

By ensuring adequate functional coverage, End-to-End (E2E) testing is a key enabling factor of continuous integration. This is even more true for web applications, where automated E2E testing is the only way to exercise the full stack used to create a modern application. The test code used for web testing usually relies on DOM locators, often...

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been relevant in all economic sectors. Job loss and decrease in hiring are among the most severe immediate financial impact of Covid-19, while lower economic growth will be the long-term effect. To get a better understanding of what happened, in this work, we have studied the trends of the job market...

In the last years, Machine Learning (ML) has become extremely used in software systems: it is applied in many different contexts such as medicine, bioinformatics, finance, automotive, only to mention a few. One of the main drawbacks recognized in the literature is that there are still no consolidated approaches and strategies to ensure the...

Software testing is a crucial part of business success to ensure final product quality. However, little concrete data exists on technical demands about it in the industry, mostly collected through personal opinion surveys on a restricted sample of professionals. In this paper, we used a different approach: we applied content analysis to a set...

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are becoming ubiquitous and assuring their quality is of paramount importance, especially in safety-critical contexts. Unfortunately, few quality assurance proposals are present in the literature. In this paper, we propose an approach for semi-automated model-based generation of executable test cases, oriented...

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are rapidly gaining importance in the human society, providing a variety of services to improve the quality of our lives, involving complex and safety-critical tasks; therefore, assuring their quality is of paramount importance. Node-RED is a Web-based visual tool inspired by the flow-based programming paradigm,...

This paper provides the results of a survey of the grey literature concerning the use of artificial intelligence to improve test automation practices. We surveyed more than 1, 200 sources of grey literature (e.g., blogs, white-papers, user manuals, StackOverflow posts) looking for highlights by professionals on how AI is adopted to aid the...

Many software bugs have disruptive consequences, both in financial terms and in loss of life. Software Testing is one widely used approach to detect software bugs and ensure software quality but the testing activity, conducted either manually or using testing frameworks, is repetitive and expensive. Runtime Monitoring, differently from Software...

In the last few years, Internet of Things (IoT) systems have drastically increased their relevance in many fundamental sectors. For this reason, assuring their quality is of paramount importance, especially in safety-critical contexts. Unfortunately, few quality assurance proposals for assuring the quality of these complex systems are present...

In this paper, we present Precise SOM (Precise Service Oriented Modelling) —a novel lightweight method for integrated domain and business process modelling—which follows the service-oriented paradigm, uses a UML profile as notation and provides detailed workflows to guide the production of the models. In our method, the UML models are precisely...

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on many economic sectors. The most severe immediate financial effects of Covid-19 include job losses and decreased hiring, and we can expect generalized lower economic growth in the long term. While such phenomena are there for all to see, measuring their scope is complex. In this work, we...

Differential testing applied in the Web context compares the current web page under test with a snapshot considered correct taken from a previous version. This technique appears to be promising and an alternative to assertions in catching regressions due to the evolution of the web application under test. This paper empirically compares...

Test automation brings several benefits but also presents significant problems that often force developers/testers to carry out tiring and costly manual tasks. Among these tiring tasks while using Selenium WebDriver for testing Web applications, driver management (i.e., version discovery, download, setup and maintenance) ranks in a top...

Differential testing applied in the Web context compares the current web page under test with a snapshot considered correct taken from a previous version. This technique appears to be promising and an alternative to assertions in catching regressions due to the evolution of the web application under test. This paper empirically compares...

Web applications have become fundamental to our lives, thus testing methods ensuring their quality are essential. Usually, Web test automation frameworks and tools use locators to interact with the GUI, serving as hooks to the widgets within Web pages. However, locators are known to be one of the most significant points of fragility in Web...

Context: While test automation offers numerous benefits, it also introduces significant challenges. Two challenges that developers and testers face on a daily basis, particularly when using Selenium WebDriver to test web applications, are driver management (involving tasks such as version identification, download, installation, and maintenance)...