Web Testing Research Group (WTRG)

As Web applications become ever more important in our lives, we rely on the assumption that this software is itself reliable. However, several studies report that software failures cost economies billions of euro annually. Because testing is arguably the most important means to ensure software reliability, the number indicates a fundamental lack of testing. Based on this insight, we aim at analyse and improve the state of the art/practice of Web Software Testing.

The main mission of the Web Testing Research Group (WTRG) of the University of Genoa is to explore novel and automated techniques for supporting software developers and testers throughout the evolution of complex web systems. Our main focus is currently on analysis, testing, program comprehension, as well as software maintenance and evolution of modern web-based applications. We aim at leveraging existing testing efforts and easing future testing activities in order to reach the goal of software engineers testing more and better.

The Web Testing Research Group is part of the department of Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering (DIBRIS), faculty of Science, University of Genova (UniGE), Italy.


Members

Filippo Ricca Filippo Ricca
Associate Professor

Personal Web Page
E-mail: filippo.ricca@unige.it 		Maurizio Leotta Maurizio Leotta
Postdoc

Personal Web Page
E-mail: maurizio.leotta@unige.it
Andrea Stocco Andrea Stocco
Ph.D. Student

Personal Web Page
E-mail: andrea.stocco@dibris.unige.it 		Diego Clerissi Diego Clerissi
Ph.D. Student

E-mail: diego.clerissi@dibris.unige.it


Recent Tools

APOGEN (Automatic Page Objects Generator)
APOGEN is a tool to help the web tester in the creation of page objects to be used for E2E testing of web applications. APOGEN automatically derives a testing model by reverse-engineering the target web application and uses a combination of clustering, dynamic and static analysis to generate Java page objects for the popular Selenium WebDriver framework.
More information can be found HERE

PESTO (PagE object tranSformation TOol)
PESTO is a tool capable of transforming a DOM-based web test suite, created using WebDriver and adopting the page object (PO) pattern, into a visual web test suite based on the Sikuli image recognition capabilities and still adopting the PO pattern. PESTO allows a web tester to experiment with the emerging visual technologies, at minimum migration cost.
More information can be found HERE

ROBULA+ (Robust XPath Locator Algorithm)
ROBULA+ is a novel algorithm able to automatically generate robust XPath-based locators for web page elements. Such locators are useful when testing web applications, because they will be likely to work also when new releases of the web application will be released. Thus, they reduce the maintenance effort of web test suites.
More information can be found HERE



Our Recent Publications in the context of Web Testing

  1. Andrea Stocco, Maurizio Leotta, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    APOGEN: Automatic Page Object Generator for Web Testing.
    Software Quality Journal, Editors: Rachel Harrison. Springer, 2016.
    DOI: 10.1007/s11219-016-9331-9, ISSN: 0963-9314.
  2. Maurizio Leotta, Andrea Stocco, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    ROBULA+: An Algorithm for Generating Robust XPath Locators for Web Testing.
    Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Volume 28, Issue 3, pp.177–204, Editors: Gerardo Canfora, Darren Dalcher, David Raffo. John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
    DOI: 10.1002/smr.1771, ISSN: 2047-7481.
  3. Maurizio Leotta, Diego Clerissi, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    Approaches and Tools for Automated End-to-End Web Testing.
    Advances in Computers, Volume 101, pp.193–237, Editor: Atif Memon. Elsevier, 2016.
    DOI: 10.1016/bs.adcom.2015.11.007, ISSN: 0065-2458.
  4. Diego Clerissi, Maurizio Leotta, Gianna Reggio, Filippo Ricca.
    Test Driven Development of Web Applications: a Lightweight Approach.
    In: Proceedings of 10th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC 2016), 6-9 September 2016, Lisbon, Portugal. IEEE, 2016. (in press)
  5. Andrea Stocco, Maurizio Leotta, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    Clustering-Aided Page Object Generation for Web Testing.
    In: Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2016), 1-9 June 2016, Lugano, Switzerland, pp.132-151, Volume 9671, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Editors: Alessandro Bozzon, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Cesare Pautasso. Springer, 2016.
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-38791-8_8, ISBN: 978-3-319-38790-1.
  6. Andrea Stocco, Maurizio Leotta, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    Automatic Page Object Generation with APOGEN.
    In: Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2016), 1-9 June 2016, Lugano, Switzerland, pp.533-537, Volume 9671, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Editors: Alessandro Bozzon, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Cesare Pautasso. Springer, 2016.
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-38791-8_42, ISBN: 978-3-319-38790-1.
  7. Diego Clerissi, Maurizio Leotta, Gianna Reggio, Filippo Ricca.
    A Lightweight Semi-automated Acceptance Test-Driven Development Approach for Web Applications.
    In: Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2016), 1-9 June 2016, Lugano, Switzerland, pp.593-597, Volume 9671, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Editors: Alessandro Bozzon, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Cesare Pautasso. Springer, 2016.
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-38791-8_55, ISBN: 978-3-319-38790-1.
  8. Andrea Stocco, Maurizio Leotta, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    Why Creating Web Page Objects Manually If It Can Be Done Automatically?
    In: Proceedings of 10th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Automation of Software Test (AST 2015 co-located with ICSE 2015), 23-24 May 2015, Firenze, Italy, pp.70-74, IEEE, 2015.
    DOI: 10.1109/AST.2015.26, ISBN: 978-1-4673-7022-6.
  9. Maurizio Leotta, Andrea Stocco, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    Meta-Heuristic Generation of Robust XPath Locators for Web Testing.
    In: Proceedings of 8th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing (SBST 2015 co-located with ICSE 2015), 18-19 May 2015, Firenze, Italy, pp.36-39, IEEE, 2015.
    DOI: 10.1109/SBST.2015.16, ISBN: 978-1-4673-7079-0.
  10. Maurizio Leotta, Andrea Stocco, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    Using Multi-Locators to Increase the Robustness of Web Test Cases.
    In: Proceedings of 8th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2015), 13-17 April 2015, Graz, Austria, pp.1-10, IEEE, 2015.
    DOI: 10.1109/ICST.2015.7102611, ISBN: 978-1-4799-7125-1.
  11. Maurizio Leotta, Andrea Stocco, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    Automated Generation of Visual Web Tests from DOM-based Web Tests.
    In: Proceedings of 30th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2015), 13-17 April, 2015, Salamanca, Spain, pp.775-782, ACM, 2015.
    DOI: 10.1145/2695664.2695847, ISBN: 978-1-4503-3196-8.
  12. Paolo Tonella, Filippo Ricca, Alessandro Marchetto.
    Recent Advances in Web Testing.
    Advances in Computers, Volume 93, pp.1–51, Elsevier, 2014.
    DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-800162-2.00001-4.
  13. Maurizio Leotta, Andrea Stocco, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    Reducing Web Test Cases Aging by means of Robust XPath Locators.
    In: Proceedings of 25th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW 2014), 3-6 November 2014, Napoli, Italy, pp.449-454, IEEE, 2014.
    DOI: 10.1109/ISSREW.2014.17, ISBN: 978-1-4799-7377-4.
  14. Andrea Stocco, Maurizio Leotta, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    PESTO: A Tool for Migrating DOM-based to Visual Web Tests.
    In: Proceedings of 14th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2014), 28-29 September 2014, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, pp.65-70, IEEE, 2014.
    DOI: 10.1109/SCAM.2014.36, ISBN: 978-0-7695-5304-7.
  15. Maurizio Leotta, Diego Clerissi, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    Visual vs. DOM-based Web Locators: An Empirical Study.
    In: Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2014), 1-4 July 2014, Toulouse, France, pp.322–340, Volume 8541, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Editors: Sven Casteleyn, Gustavo Rossi, Marco Winckler, Springer, 2014.
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-08245-5_19, ISBN: 978-3-319-08244-8.
  16. Maurizio Leotta, Diego Clerissi, Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella.
    Capture-Replay vs. Programmable Web Testing: An Empirical Assessment during Test Case Evolution.
    In: Proceedings of 20th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2013), 14-17 October 2013, Koblenz, Germany, pp.272-281, IEEE, 2013.
    DOI: 10.1109/WCRE.2013.6671302, ISBN: 978-1-4799-2931-3.
  17. Filippo Ricca, Maurizio Leotta, Andrea Stocco, Diego Clerissi, Paolo Tonella.
    Web Testware Evolution.
    In: Proceedings of 15th IEEE International Symposium on Web Systems Evolution (WSE 2013), 27 September 2013, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, pp.39-44, IEEE, 2013.
    DOI: 10.1109/WSE.2013.6642415, ISBN: 978-1-4799-1608-5.
  18. Maurizio Leotta, Diego Clerissi, Filippo Ricca, Cristiano Spadaro.
    Comparing the Maintainability of Selenium WebDriver Test Suites Employing Different Locators: A Case Study.
    In: Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Joining AcadeMiA and Industry Contributions to testing Automation (JAMAICA 2013 co-located with ISSTA 2013), 15 July 2013, Lugano, Switzerland, pp.53-58, ACM, 2013.
    DOI: 10.1145/2489280.2489284, ISBN: 978-1-4503-2161-7.
  19. Maurizio Leotta, Diego Clerissi, Filippo Ricca, Cristiano Spadaro.
    Repairing Selenium Test Cases: An Industrial Case Study about Web Page Element Localization.
    In: Proceedings of 6th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2013), 18-22 March 2013 , Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, pp.487-488, IEEE, 2013.
    DOI: 10.1109/ICST.2013.73, ISBN: 978-1-4673-5961-0.
  20. Maurizio Leotta, Diego Clerissi, Filippo Ricca, Cristiano Spadaro.
    Improving Test Suites Maintainability with the Page Object Pattern: An Industrial Case Study.
    In: Proceedings of 6th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW 2013), 18-22 March 2013 , Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, pp.108-113, IEEE, 2013.
    DOI: 10.1109/ICSTW.2013.19, ISBN: 978-1-4799-1324-4.
  21. Alessandro Marchetto, Paolo Tonella, Filippo Ricca.
    ReAjax: A Reverse Engineering Tool for Ajax Web Applications.
    IET Software, Volume: 6, Issue: 1, pp.33-49, IET, 2012.
    DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0152, ISSN: 1751-8806.