Finlay’s paper “” was accepted for publication in the Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) journal! Super congrats Finlay (and co-author Markos!)! This paper was a collaboration with Natalia Romanova, Chris Buzon and Dale Paas from our industry partner Prodigy Education.

Abstract:
“The HTML5 canvas is widely used to display high quality graphics in web applications. However, the combination of
web, GUI, and visual techniques that are required to build canvas applications, together with the lack of testing and debugging
tools, makes developing such applications very challenging. To help direct future research on testing canvas applications, in this
paper we present a taxonomy of testable canvas issues. First, we extracted 2,403 canvas related issue reports from 123 open
source GitHub projects that use the HTML5 canvas. Second, we constructed our taxonomy by manually classifying a random
sample of 332 issue reports. Our manual classification identified five broad categories of testable canvas issues, such as Visual
and Performance issues. We found that Visual issues are the most frequent (35%), while Performance issues are relatively infrequent
(5%). We also found that many testable canvas issues that present themselves visually on the canvas are actually caused by
other components of the web application. Our taxonomy of testable canvas issues can be used to steer future research into
canvas issues and testing.”

See our Publications for the full paper.