An Object-Based Data Flow Testing Approach for Web Applications

Abstract

In recent years, Web applications have grown rapidly because of their abilities to provide online information access to anyone at anytime around the world. As Web applications become complex, there is a growing concern about their quality and reliability. This paper extends traditional data flow testing techniques to Web applications. Several data flow issues about analyzing HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents in Web applications are discussed. An object-based data flow testing approach is presented. The approach is based on a test model that captures data flow test artifacts of Web applications. In the test model, each entity of a Web application is modeled as an object. The data flow information of the functions within an object or across objects is then captured using various flow graphs. Based on the object-based test model, data flow test cases for a Web application can be systematically and selectively generated in five different levels.

Dynamic model extraction and statistical analysis of Web applications

“…Various Web application modeling methods have been proposed for different purposes, such as testing [6,7], architecture recovery [4,8] and design [2,5]. Each method emphasizes some particular aspect of a Web application.…”

“…Liu et al [7] extended traditional data flow testing techniques to Web applications. The data flow information is captured using various flow graphs.…”

Virtual DOM coverage for effective testing of dynamic web applications

“…The loop in lines 4-30 traverses each data dependence, which essentially denotes a definition of the variable, to compute the possible values. If the definition is an assignment of a constant value, the value is added to the set (lines 5-7); If it is a copy from another variable, method computeVar() is recursively invoked on the source variable (lines [8][9][10]; If the variable is a formal parameter, the possible values of the parameter are loaded from the context and added to the value set; If it is defined through a binary operation such as string concatenation and integer addition, depending on if we could execute the operation offline, we may evaluate the operation on each pair of possible operand values (lines [17][18][19][20] or simply convert the operation to a string and concatenate it with the operand values to get the symbolic representations of the possible values (lines [22][23][24]. We currently support offline evaluation of arithmetic operations and string concatenation, string length and substring operations if the concrete values of the string operands can be computed.…”

“…In contrast, our approach generates a V-DOM tree for each server script. Liu et al [20] and Kung et al [19] proposed multiple models, each targeting on representing a single tier in web applications. They also suggested that data flow analysis could be performed at multiple levels.…”

Model-Based Testing of Thin-Client Web Applications and Navigation Input

“…Usually for these kinds of robustness tests white box testing techniques are used (e.g. Liu et al [14] and Kung et al [9]). Our system is independent of the concrete implementation language(s) of the web application.…”