Modeling Web Applications' Interactions And Generating Their Tests

With the development of Web application, it becomes a tremendous success which permeates into the nation's economy and the people's livelihood, such as commercial fields and people's daily life. A Web application is a very complex, distributed, multi-tier, interactive system, which provides a brand-new way for users to deploy software application. The isomerism, dynamics, diverse connections, variant control flows, and rapid development and deployment of Web applications have brought the new challenge for their testing. At present, there are no systematic method and tool that are employed to test Web applications efficiently. The improved traditional methods or a new modeling and testing method appropriate for Web application testing are desired urgently for all the characteristics of Web applications. These days, the research on modeling and testing of Web application was concerned almost about the static models for Web navigation and testing, but few pay attention to the interactions arising in Web applications. In fact, the interaction feature is a matter of concern to the functionalities of Web applications. Web application is an interactive system since it came into our life. Consequently, a novel approach to modeling and testing of Web application is needed urgently to ensure the reliability of interactions and so as to guarantee the safety and the functional correctness for Web applications.The research object of this dissertation is Web applications. The key to the research is the modeling and testing of interactions in Web applications. The primary contributions and innovation is as below:1. The behaviors of Web browser interactions influence the security, functionalities and navigation of Web applications. In this dissertation, special care on Web browser interactions is paid and an approach to modeling on-the-fly navigation models and test generation with Web browser interactions is proposed. The extended FSM (OFNM/FSM) is employed to formalize the on-the-fly navigation models and a FSM-TT (FSM Test-Tree) derived from the OFNM/FSM is constructed using the algorithm we present. Test generation is given out from FSM-TT which satisfies the corresponding coverage criteria.2. With the evolution of Web applications, database has been widely used in Web applications and database interactions influence the navigations of Web applications. Besides, database interactions are among the most essential functional features in current Web applications. In this dissertation, database interactions in modeling and testing Web applications are taken into account. GFSMs (Guarded Finite State Machines), which are augmented FSMs are employed as a tool to model database interactions. A GFSM-TT(GFSM test-tree) is constructed from GFSM. From the test-tree, minimal test set is derived to be employed to generate test. Finally, an algorithm is designed to optimize the test paths by decreasing the overlap and animinate a part of redundancy.3. Web applications depend more and more on the back-end database to provide many more functionalities. Supporting event-driven programming, ASP.NET separates the code from the content using the code-behind feature. Additionally, database interactions make a great impact on the navigation and fuctionalities of Web applications. Among exstrating and testing of database interactions in ASP.NET Web applicatons, few is reported or publised. In this dissertation, we propose an event-based dependence graph models (EDGMs) to model and extracting database interactions in Web applications. A FSM was used as a tool to model the presentation (.aspx) of Web page. And Control Flow Graph (CFG) and Database Interaction Flow Graph (DIFG) are employed to extracted and model its corresponding logical process (.cs) of one page. From the EDGMs, a FSM test-tree (FSM-TT) was constructed. Based on FSM-TT, the test sequences were generated. At last, by elaborating the test sequences with the FSMs of Web pages, we got the more detailed test sequences.4. The behavior of the Web browsers may have impact on the correctness of Web applications: a Web application may malfunction when it is put into its supporting environment. To the question of Web browser's interaction behaviors, this dissertation proposed an approach to modeling Web applications by the means of combination of Web functional modules and the browser's interactions. A Web application is referred to as a system which consisted of many different functional modules. At last, test generation and optimization to decrease the overlap are given out.5. In the end of this paper, based on the general Web page navigation models (usually described using UML statecharts), a prototype tool, called AGT4W, used to automatic modeling Web browser's interactions and automatic generating tests for Web applications is designed and implemented. And the realization methods and details are all give out.