INTEGRATED GRAPH-BASED TESTING PIPELINE FOR MODERN SINGLE-PAGE APPLICATIONS

Abstract

In the modern software development ecosystem, Single-Page Applications (SPAs) have become the de facto standard for delivering rich, interactive user experiences. Frameworks such as React, Vue, and Angular enable developers to build highly responsive interfaces; however, they also introduce intricate client-side state management and complex routing logic. As applications grow in size and complexity, manually writing and maintaining end-to-end tests for every possible user journey becomes infeasible. Moreover, ensuring comprehensive coverage − across functionality, security, performance, and usability − requires an integrated and adaptive testing strategy that can scale with rapid release cadences.

This paper introduces a novel, integrated testing pipeline that augments conventional unit, component, integration, API, performance, security, and accessibility testing with a formal Graph-Based Testing (GBT) model. We model the SPA as a directed graph, where each vertex represents a distinct UI state or view, and each directed edge corresponds to a user-triggered transition (e.g., clicks, form submissions, navigation events). Leveraging graph algorithms, our approach automatically identifies missing paths to achieve exhaustive node, edge, and simple path coverage up to a configurable length, synthesizes minimal test sequences, and generates executable test scripts in frameworks such as Jest (unit / component), Cypress or Playwright (integration / E2E), and Postman (API).

To select and tune the appropriate tools for each testing facet, we employ a multi-criteria decision framework based on linear additive utility and Pareto analysis. Each tool is evaluated across five normalized dimensions − defect detection accuracy, execution speed, licensing or infrastructure cost, adoption effort, and scalability − weighted according to project priorities.

Finally, we integrate this GBT-driven test generation and tool orchestration into a CI / CD pipeline, enriched with pre-production security scans via OWASP ZAP and periodic load tests with JMeter. The result is a continuous, self-healing suite of tests that adapts to UI changes, automatically refactors itself against graph-differencing alerts, and maintains high confidence levels even under aggressive sprint schedules. Empirical evaluation on two large-scale SPAs demonstrates a 40 % reduction in manual test authoring effort and a 25 % increase in overall coverage metrics compared to traditional approaches.