Testing stateful web application workflows

Most web applications used for complex business operations and/or employing advanced GUI frameworks have stateful functionality. Certain workflows, for example, might require completing certain steps before a transaction is committed, or a request sent by a client-side UI element might need several preceding requests that all contribute to the session state. Most automated tools focus on a request and maybe a redirection, thus completely missing the point in these cases, where resending a request gets ignored by the target application. As a result, while these tools are getting better day by day, using them for testing such execution paths are usually out of the question. Since thorough assessment is cumbersome without such tools, there's progress, but we are far from plug- and-play products. This paper focuses on the capabilities of currently available solutions, demonstrating their pros and cons, along with opportunities for improvement.