Developing Web-Application’s Automated Testing Technique
The article is devoted to the technique of automated testing of NSUts - automatic assessment system for programming tasks developed at NSU. The main priority for this technique is to test both the old and the new versions of the application, so that the same or minimally modified tests could be executed on two versions of the system with different architectures. This could be useful while organizing the development process for other applications with a long life cycle. To test not only the server but also the client side of the web application, we suggest using tools like Selenium WebDriver to simulate user actions by sending commands to real browsers. We use the well-known Page Object design pattern to handle differences in HTML layout and functionality, and describe a number of ways to make developed tests less fragile and easily adapt those to work with the new version of the system. The article also describes the use of this technique to organize automated testing of the NSUts system and analyzes its effectiveness. The analysis shows that the estimated code coverage by these tests is quite high, and therefore the technique can be considered effective and applied to other similar web applications.