Automatic Detection of Potential Layout Faults Following Changes to Responsive Web Pages (N)

Abstract

Due to the exponential increase in the number ofmobile devices being used to access the World Wide Web, it iscrucial that Web sites are functional and user-friendly across awide range of Web-enabled devices. This necessity has resulted in the introduction of responsive Web design (RWD), which usescomplex cascading style sheets (CSS) to fluidly modify a Web site's appearance depending on the viewport width of the device in use. Although existing tools may support the testing of responsive Web sites, they are time consuming and error-prone to use because theyrequire manual screenshot inspection at specified viewport widths. Addressing these concerns, this paper presents a method thatcan automatically detect potential layout faults in responsively designed Web sites. To experimentally evaluate this approach, weimplemented it as a tool, called ReDeCheck, and applied itto 5 real-world web sites that vary in both their approach toresponsive design and their complexity. The experiments revealthat ReDeCheck finds 91% of the inserted layout faults.