Comparing coverage criteria for dynamic web application: An empirical evaluation

Web applications have become popular and a preferred mean for users to do various crucial tasks such as selling and buying goods, doing short tasks, controlling smart houses and bank account management. The correctness of all such applications is important and requires thorough testing. Structural testing is widely used to achieve correctness in traditional software's, however, for web applications, it is challenging because of its dynamic and heterogeneous nature. To achieve desired structural coverage of web applications different dynamic coverage criteria are used as a quality assessment indicator. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of the proposed coverage criteria. In this paper, we conduct an empirical evaluation by evaluating and comparing the fault detection effectiveness and efficiency of various dynamic coverage criteria by performing mutation analysis. We conduct a series of experiments to assess and compare four widely used coverage criteria on seven open-source case studies including small to large scale applications. We performed mutation analysis by first generating different faulty versions (mutants) for the case studies and then by executing test suites to record mutation score for each criterion. The results from most of the subject applications show that DOM coverage is the most effective and efficient criterion followed by Virtual DOM, HTML Element and Statement coverage criteria.