A Taxonomy of Testable HTML5 Canvas Issues

The HTML5
<canvas>
is widely used to display high quality graphics in web applications. However, the combination of web, GUI, and visual techniques that are required to build
<canvas>
applications, together with the lack of testing and debugging tools, makes developing such applications very challenging. To help direct future research on testing
<canvas>
applications, in this paper we present a taxonomy of testable
<canvas>
issues. First, we extracted 2,403
<canvas>
-related issue reports from 123 open source GitHub projects that use the HTML5
<canvas>
. Second, we constructed our taxonomy by manually classifying a random sample of 332 issue reports. Our manual classification identified five broad categories of testable
<canvas>
issues, such as
Visual
and
Performance
issues. We found that
Visual
issues are the most frequent (35%), while
Performance
issues are relatively infrequent (5%). We also found that many testable
<canvas>
issues that present themselves visually on the
<canvas>
are actually caused by other components of the web application. Our taxonomy of testable
<canvas>
issues can be used to steer future research into
<canvas>
issues and testing.