Research On Web Application Test Page Object Generation Method

Web applications are developing at a very fast speed.Testing plays a vital role in quality assurance.End-to-end testing is widely used.However,when applications under test change frequently,the test cases will become difficult to maintain.Some studies apply page object design pattern to improve maintainability.By separating test codes from the detailed information of Web pages,underlying codes of Web pages are abstracted into page objects,which can be called by test cases.In the process of forming a page object,the existing method uses the page structure information to calculate the page similarity to avoid the generation of duplicate objects.However,only the DOM tree edit distance is used to determine the DOM structure,which affects the accuracy of generating the page objects.In order to improve the accuracy of page object generation,this paper proposes a method of generating test page objects automatically for Web applications,based on the clustering idea of in-depth learning.From the aspect of possible relative factors for clustering stage in page object generation,this paper do a full study.A two-stages multi-factors page clustering method is proposed,which is used to guide the generation of test page objects.It considers DOM structure,CSS style and DOM element ID attribute values when calculating the similarity of Web pages.Meanwhile,different weights are assigned to these influence factors.Considering the incomplete information acquisition of DOM structure diagram in above approach,the feature of DOM structure diagram is extracted by auto-edcoder in deep learning,which is used for page clustering and page object generation.64 Web applications in six categories are tested to verify the validity of the two-stages multi-factors page clustering algorithm and the method of generating page objects based on DOM structure diagrams.The experimental results show that the proposed method of automatic generation of Web application test page objects is feasible.The generated page objects can cover most of application functions,which can help the creation and maintenance of Web test cases more effective.