Framework and Benchmark for Code-Driven Agentic Testing in Web Development

Bin Hong, Zhenchao Zhang, Jiyuan He, Kai Zhang, Zhenya Huang


Abstract
End-to-end GUI testing is essential for verifying web applications, yet existing evaluations rely on predefined checklists and are confined to the data and frameworks of web generation benchmarks, leaving the bug-discovery ability of vision-language models (VLMs) systematically untested. We introduce Code-driven Agentic Testing (CAT), a paradigm in which the agent writes Playwright code to drive the browser, gathers feedback, and autonomously explores web applications to uncover bugs. We instantiate CAT with CATJudge, an agentic framework that unifies Browser-Use and Computer-Use tools within a single environment and CATTest, a benchmark of 102 AI-generated web applications with carefully annotated bugs, built through close human-AI collaboration to feature complex interactions and subtle defects. Experiments with mainstream VLMs show that all evaluated models perform poorly, revealing a clear gap between current VLM capabilities and the demands of real-world testing in AI web development.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2075
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
47250–47279
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2075/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bin Hong, Zhenchao Zhang, Jiyuan He, Kai Zhang, and Zhenya Huang. 2026. Framework and Benchmark for Code-Driven Agentic Testing in Web Development. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 47250–47279, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Framework and Benchmark for Code-Driven Agentic Testing in Web Development (Hong et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2075.pdf