Improving test case generation for web applications using automated interface discovery

With the growing complexity of web applications, identifying web interfaces that can be used for testing such applications has become increasingly challenging. Many techniques that work effectively when applied to simple web applications are insufficient when used on modern, dynamic web applications, and may ultimately result in inadequate testing of the applications' functionality. To address this issue, we present a technique for automatically discovering web application interfaces based on a novel static analysis algorithm. We also report the results of an empirical evaluation in which we compare our technique against a traditional approach. The results of the comparison show that our technique can (1) discover a higher number of interfaces and (2) help generate test inputs that achieve higher coverage. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.2.5 [Software Engineering]: Testing and Debugging; General Terms: Algorithms, Experimentation, Reliability, Verification

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: William G. J. Halfond, Alessandro Orso
• Keywords: Dynamic Web Applications, SIGSOFT 2007, Simple Web Applications, Software Engineering, Web Applications