Promoting End-User Involvement in Web-based tasks: a Model-Driven Engineering Approach to Form-filling and User-Acceptance Testing

Abstract

Many applications which formerly were designed for the desktop have gradually made atransition to the Web. Accordingly, an increasing number of tasks can now be conductedthrough the Web. As a result, opportunities arise to achieve a higher level of automation thatthe one being previously possible with proprietary, OS-anchored desktop applications. Thisresulted in an emerging interest in empowering users to check, adapt and customize the waythey navigate and make use of these applications. Web automation, Web augmentation, orWeb mashups are performant approaches that pursuit this aim.This work explores the use of scripting for two tasks, namely, Web-form filling and WebapplicationUser-Acceptance Testing (UAT). In both cases, the challenge rests on abstractingfrom scripting code to higher models that permit the notion of scripting to be hidden intomore-affordable representations. Accordingly, this work abstracts scripts into platformindependentmodels. For Web-form filling, we tackle the problem of repetitive form-fillingfrom external sources. The solution is realized through WebFeeder, a plugin for iMacros thatintroduces autofilling-script models as first-class artifacts in iMacros. As for UAT, we tackle theissue of the need for the regular physical-presence of stakeholders for UAT in Agilemethodologies. In this case, we resort to mind-maps as the model representation. These ideasare fleshed out in TestMind, an editor for FitNesse that permits to capture UAT sessions as testmaps. Summing it up, the bottom line is that WebFeeder and TestMind showcase the benefitsthat Model-Driven Engineering can bring to Web Automation. By moving away from code tohigh-level models, Model-Driven Engineering reduces the entry barrier for the participation ofend-users.