UCM-Driven Testing of Web Applications

Despite their apparent simplicity, Web applications are surprisingly difficult to develop, if our aim is to build applications that behave correctly under regular conditions as well as adverse circumstances like out-of-order requests and race conditions. In this paper, we describe our experiences deriving customer-oriented acceptance tests for Web applications by modeling the essential capabilities of such applications with Use Case Maps (UCMs). Abstract test purposes are generated from a UCM model using scenario definitions and scenario extraction tools. These test purposes are then converted interactively to test cases in the FitNesse acceptance testing framework, which is popular in the Extreme Programming (XP) community. The test cases are used to validate a Web application where several typical but non-trivial bugs were planted. Challenges in the automation of such process are also discussed.