Towards collaborative testing of workflows in WMVC-based web applications

At the core of visual testing is the idea that displaying the test failure on the visual artifacts that represent the constituents of a software under test, rather than just describing it textually has the potential of increasing clarity and understanding of the problem amongst a software testing team. This is particularly true and even necessary in a collaborative testing environment which requires greater communication between testers and developers. In this work we introduce a collaborative visual state-based testing methodology for applications developed in Ruby on Rails, a representative of the Workflow and MVC-based web applications development environment. Our methodology permits, in real time, two or more software testers to share, review, and comment on state-based test results of workflows under test. Collaborators can also examine test cases, edit them and initiate testing sessions. In the paper we describe the design of our collaborative testing methodology.