Testing a distributed Wiki web application with QuickCheck

Abstract

Web applications are complex, heterogeneous and dynamic. To ensure their correct functional behaviour is a difficult task and by simply using unit testing and manually generated test cases it may be difficult to detect errors present on them. We consider that the use of Quickcheck, a testing tool that provides automatic test case generation and state-based testing, can be a good way to test web applications. To show that, we have tested a web application that uses a distributed database system by creating a model of it. By using this Quickcheck model we have generated and executed test sequences that address the dynamic aspects of the web application. Using this method we were able to find an error that lead to inconsistencies in the data structure of the application.