Extending WebDriver: A Cloud Approach

Functional testing of web and mobile applications consists on impersonating a user through some kind of GUI automation technology, being Selenium the most popular solution nowadays. This piece of research progresses in this area by proposing an advanced User Impersonation as a Service (UIaaS) based on cloud technologies. The proposed approach can be seen as a layered service, in which the top tier is a platform called ElasTest, a Software as a Service (SaaS) testing tool aimed to ease end-to-end testing of different kind of applications. The capability to impersonate user provided by ElasTest is built on the top of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) implemented by extending the W3C WebDriver recommendation with advance features to assess web and mobile applications. Finally, an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer is used as ground technology. This infrastructure has been implemented by leveraging open source lightweight container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.