Identifying common pages in Coverage

The mabl Coverage page will now report test coverage in terms of common pages of your application. We use a technique called "url-clustering" to group dynamic URLs of pages, giving you more accurate and readable coverage data on how mabl is testing your apps.

What is url clustering?

Many web applications have dynamic urls that include random ids and other large groups of distinct urls that describe very similar pages. This means that one web application could have thousands of distinct urls, yet there might only be very small differences in content displayed for each url. mabl now analyzes the distinct urls within a given workspace and combines urls that appear to be variations of the same type of page.

How does url clustering work?

Take a look at the following example mabl urls. Every mabl user will have seen a url of this form since one exists for every workspace.

app.mabl.com/workspaces/83hd632h9a-w/insights
app.mabl.com/workspaces/uvg9eh2n56-w/insights
app.mabl.com/workspaces/qn243lf97h-w/insights
app.mabl.com/workspaces/bv82bfnv75-w/insights

The urls in this group all display different insights, but they share the same page template. mabl will cluster urls like the ones above into one group to represent one page of an application. A cluster will be in the following form:

app.mabl.com/workspaces/*/insights

The distinct url variations that are grouped together will be represented with a wildcard [ * ] in the locations where the variations occurred. Here is another more generic example:

/store/women/pants/pants-variation-1
/store/women/pants/pants-variation-2
...
/store/women/pants/pants-variation-2048

The above urls would be combined into the following cluster:

/store/women/pants/*

Urls that are very unique will be contained in their own clusters. For example, with the mabl application, the login page will be its own cluster since there is only one and the page is the same for all users.

app.mabl.com/login

How does this feature affect my Coverage metrics?

Coverage metrics and charts now have a clearer display of how well your test suite tests your application, especially for customers with the segment integration and many dynamic urls. mabl will now get the total pages count and the covered pages count from the number of comon pages instead of the distinct urls. This will be reflected in the charts on the Coverage page, in the table on the Coverage page, and the Test Coverage item on the Dashboard.

With fewer total pages, you can now more easily scroll through the table on the Coverage page to identify pages within your application that need more journeys.

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How often do my coverage metrics update?

The coverage data is updated at least every 12 hours. This includes clustering urls and aggregating metrics by clusters.