Submitted Abstract
In continuous integration and agile methodologies (devops), rapid feedback is required at every level, from the developer to the product managers, from any small code change to a full product release. Productivity depends on the ability of the tests to find real problems in a timely and reliable fashion. Agile methodologies enabled companies to drastically increase software release pace and reduce time-to-market. However, the price to pay is the increased testing costs; more tests needs to be written and executed more frequently. Software companies report that the cost of testing is growing quadratically with two factors increasing linearly: (1) the code submission rate and (2) the size of the test pool. This implies that in devops, test automation and generally test maintenance becomes a major problem. Functional testing is the prominent industrial testing practice. Based on functional tests, quality assurance teams ensure that the version of the SUTs complies with every requirement. However, in practice, creating and maintaining functional test cases is costly. To reduce this cost, companies focus on automating the test execution and test reporting phases, while the other phases of the testing activities remain largely manual. In agile approaches, testers are using pragmatic lightweight techniques such as statistical analysis or keyword driven testing. For web applications, web interfaces are the natural entry point to functional tests, but also an unstable one subject to frequent changes. This is why automating test generation and maintenance is the first issue to address. This proposal is tackling the problem of creation and maintenance of functional test suites in applications with a rich user interface developed in an agile environment. More specifically, we intend to work on the automation of the test scripting phase and the test maintenance phase.