Automated web testing over the last decade: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Web applications play a vital role in every section ranging from business to administration, making operations efficient. Reliability must be ensured to avoid loss of credibility and revenue. Testing modern web applications is very tedious due to their dynamic and asynchronous nature. Web applications evolve rapidly to serve the growing needs of the customers and manual testing is often infeasible to maintain the reliability and validity of the system due to time and resource constraints. Automated web application testing is an ongoing popular research domain due to the complexity imposed by web applications. This paper conducts a systematic literature review on the practices of automated web testing over the past decade. PRISMA framework is used to screen the most relevant research papers using Scopus and Web of Science as the database. A total of 26 papers were selected based on the inclusion criteria and quality assessment. The articles were fetched and their contributions are documented to know about current practices and the effectiveness of such approaches in minimizing human effort.  Results indicate broadly two categories of automated testing, one depending on the tester’s expertise to generate test cases, and the other relying on crawlers to exploit the system dynamically.