Plug the Database & Play With Automatic Testing: Improving System Testing by Exploiting Persistent Data

A key challenge in automatic Web testing is the generation of syntactically and semantically valid input values that can exercise the many functionalities that impose constraints on the validity of the inputs. Existing test case generation techniques either rely on manually curated catalogs of values, or extract values from external data sources, such as the Web or publicly available knowledge bases. Unfortunately, relying on manual effort is generally too expensive for most practical applications, while domain-specific and application-specific data can be hardly found either on the Web or in general purpose knowledge bases.