Auto-Testing AJAX-Based Web Applications

Asynchronous JAVASCRIPT and XML (AJAX)-based web applications (web apps) are different from traditional applications as they rely on stateful asynchronous communication and runtime manipulation of the DOM (document object model) tree. In this paper, we try to validate a method proposed by Mesbah et al. (2012) for testing AJAX applications automatically using two case studies. We try to identify AJAX-specific errors. Our goal is to replicate their experiment on two different web applications and comment on the performance of their approach. We use ‘Crawljax’ (designed by Mesbah et al.) to create a state-flow graph. First, we check the DOM validity for every state and, second, we check the navigation of the states. Finally, we present the results from our case studies.