Visual testing in different testing approaches
Name
Anne-Liis Tamm
Abstract
As web applications are becoming increasingly important, the developers have to face the problems related to cross-browsing. Different applications and web pages may have a lot of layout issues in different browsers. Tracking these kinds of issues is made even harder, by the variety of operation systems and browser versions in use. Many software companies use exploratory testing for finding these issues, but this is quite time consuming and expensive. There are only a few tools for alleviating these problems by helping find the cross-browsing issues. Most of them use DOM comparison, which means that layout issues are found by comparing different browsers DOM structure of the web page. This method is very simple, but compared to other methods it is very slow and may give a lot of false-positive results as the DOM may differ in many browsers and the method does not take that into account.
One of the new automated tool, for finding cross-browsing layout issues is Browserbite. It uses a different approach, which makes it quicker and more reliable. Still a lot of testers are considering between manual testing and automated tools - which is more efficient and superior. Although automated tools become more preferable and save more time (compared to manual testing) they may not be as reliable and effective as manual testing.
This thesis showed, that automated tools may not always be better and more efficient than manual testing. Although time spent to perform the tests was almost 5 times smaller with the tool (compared to manual testing), the difference between the number of found issues was remarkable. Although the number of reported false-positive issues was bigger with manual testing, it found over 10% more issues compared to the automated Browserbite tool.
This may be caused by many reasons- as the tool is quite new and is still being developed, it may not be programmed to find all the possible faults that can appear in cross-browsing. The configuration may also have had its own part- the tool found very few issues which appeared on small objects. For example, button sizes, shapes and colors went unnoticed quite frequently. Despite this, it can be said that the tool is suitable for regression testing as it is very quick and its user interface allows to analyse issues in a very simple means. It can also be said, that the combination of tester and the tool gives the best solution- as the tool has features that makes testing simpler, issues are easy to find. Therefore, during test planning, you don`t have to consider only one or another approach - a combination of manual and automated testing may give even better solution.
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Bachelor - Information Technology
Supervisor(s)
Kaspar Loog, Margus Niitsoo
Defence year
2012