Automated complete test case coverage for web based applications

Exhaustive testing is said to be impossible due to the various combinations of test cases possible on a specific page, not considering the whole system. In this paper, the automated testing of all possible combinations for a given page is attempted using a system which was named CRaTCP-'Control Ripper and Test Case Player'. The technique involves: the extraction of all the controls from a given page; the assessment of the validations for those controls; the automatic generation of all possible test scenarios in an excel sheet; and finally executing those test cases on the given page. CRaTCP analyses the page source of a dynamic page and hence is not dependent on the programming language that creates the dynamic page. The system has been tested on custom pages and then has been evaluated against random web pages. The results obtained on the custom pages are promising. All controls were retrieved, with the proper insertion of the various combinations of scenarios into the excel sheet, hence achieving a complete test coverage automatically. This was due to the fact that proper coding standards have been used to implement the custom pages. CRaTCP was also evaluated against some online web pages and the results were satisfactory. Though pages created are very developers' dependent, the script was able to extract the controls and list them in the excel sheet. The results however showed some limitations of the prototype which will be taken up in the next version. With CRaTCP, neither do testers need tomaually create test cases and nor execute them. This does not imply that automation will completely replace manual testing, but will provide adequate support to the testing life cycle.