Automated Acceptance Testing of JavaScript Web Applications

Acceptance testing is an important part of software development and it is performed to ensure that a system delivers its required functionalities. Today, most modern interactive web applications are designed using Web 2.0 technologies, many among them relying on JavaScript. JavaScript enables the development of client-side functionality through the dynamic modification of the web-page's content and structure without calls to the server. This implies that server-side testing frameworks will necessarily fail to test the complete application behaviors. In this paper we present a method for automated acceptance testing of JavaScript web applications to ensure that required functionalities have been implemented. Using an intuitive, human-readable scripting language our method allows users to describe user stories in high level declarative test scripts and to then execute these test scripts on a web application using an automated website crawler. We also describe a case study that evaluates our approach in terms of capabilities to translate user stories in automated acceptance test scripts.