Due to the exponential increase in the number of mobile devices being used to access the World Wide Web, it is crucial that web sites are functional and user-friendly across a wide range of web-enabled devices. This necessity has resulted in the introduction of responsive web design (RWD), which uses complex 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 they require manual screenshot inspection at specified viewport ... [more] widths. Addressing these concerns, this paper presents a method that can automatically detect potential layout faults in responsively designed web sites. To experimentally evaluate this approach, we implemented it as a tool, called REDECHECK, and applied it to 5 real-world web sites that vary in both their approach to responsive design and their complexity. The experiments reveal that REDECHECK finds 91% of the inserted layout faults.

DOI

Bibtex Entry

@inproceedings{Walsh2015,
  author    = "Walsh, Thomas A. and McMinn, Phil and Kapfhammer, Gregory M.",
  title     = "Automatic Detection of Potential Layout Faults Following Changes to Responsive Web Pages",
  booktitle = "International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2015)",
  pages     = "709--714",
  year      = "2015",
  publisher = "ACM"
}