WebAppWalker is a framework for automated UI-level testing of web applications. The framework gathers the set of events available on a web site, such as clicks on DOM elements, scrolling, and filling forms, and automatically triggers sequences of these events. Which sequences to trigger is decided by a strategy. You can implement a new test generation approach by implementing a new strategy.

We have instantiated the WebAppWalker framework in two projects:

EventBreak is an approach to analyze the responsiveness of web applications through performance-guided test generation. See this paper for details:

EventBreak: Analyzing the Responsiveness of User Interfaces through Performance-Guided Test Generation
by Michael Pradel, Parker Schuh, George Necula, and Koushik Sen
at Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA), 2014

The easiest way to experiment with EventBreak is to use this Virtualbox VM image, where EventBreak, all its requirements, and several benchmark applications are pre-installed. The image contains a file README_EventBreak_Artifact.txt with instructions on how to use it.

This approach analyzes execution traces gathered from human users of a web site to infer common usage patterns called macro events. Following the Monkey See, Monkey Do principle, the automated test generator then imitates human users by replaying the macro events. See this paper for details:

Monkey See, Monkey Do: Effective Generation of GUI Tests with Inferred Macro Events
by Markus Ermuth and Michael Pradel at International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), 2016

• Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/michaelpradel/WebAppWalker.git

• Install jpm (required to launch WebAppWalker):

npm install jpm --global

• Install Firefox >= 38.0

Start Firefox with the WebAppWalker extension:

jpm run -b /path/to/your/firefox --binary-args="-no-remote"

By default, jpm creates a new Firefox profile each time you run WebAppWalker. To store visited URLs, settings, etc., create and use a profile specifically for WebAppWalker.

• Create a new profile via the profile manager:

/path/to/your/firefox -no-remote --ProfileManager

• Start WebAppWalker with the newly created profile:

jpm run -b /path/to/your/firefox --binary-args="-no-remote" -p nameOfYourProfile

Go to some URL and start WebAppWalker by clicking the "Play" button. You should see that WebAppWalker triggers events, such as clicks. To stop it, click the "Pause" button.

By default, WebAppWalker uses a random search strategy to decide which event to trigger next. We have developed several other strategies, e.g., the EventBreak strategy. To modify the strategy, open the lib/main.js file and modify the line that starts with var search =.

To implement your own strategy, the easiest will be to copy lib/search/random_search.js and start from there.