Abstract
Automated testing of JavaScript web applications is complicated by the communication with servers. Specifically, it is difficult to test the JavaScript code in isolation from the server code and database contents. We present a practical solution to this problem. First, we demonstrate that formal server interface descriptions are useful in automated testing of JavaScript web applications for separating the concerns of the client and the server. Second, to support the construction of server interface descriptions for existing applications, we introduce an effective inference technique that learns communication patterns from sample data.
By incorporating interface descriptions into the testing tool Artemis, our experimental results show that we increase the level of automation for high-coverage testing on a collection of JavaScript web applications that exchange JSON data between the clients and servers. Moreover, we demonstrate that the inference technique can quickly and accurately learn useful server interface descriptions.