Abstract
Web applications are increasingly prominent in society, serving a wide variety of user needs. Engineers seeking to enhance, test, and maintain these applications and third-party programmers wishing to utlize these applications need to understand their interfaces. In this paper, therefore, we present methodologies for characterizing the interfaces of web applications through a form of dynamic analysis, in which directed requests are sent to the application, and responses are analyzed to draw inferences about its interface. We also provide mechanisms to increase the scalability of the approach. Finally, we evaluate the approach’s performance on six non-trivial web applications.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Christensen, E., Curbera, F., Meredith, G., Weerawarana, S.: Web services description language (2001), http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl
Fisher II., M., Elbaum, S., Rothermel, G.: Dynamic characterization of web application interfaces. Technical Report UNL-TR-CSE-2006-0010, University of Nebraska - Lincoln (2006)
GraphViz (2006), http://www.graphviz.org/
Cohen, D., Dalal, S., Fredman, M., Patton, G.: The AETG system: An approach to testing based on combinatorial design. IEEE Trans. on Softw. Eng. 23(7), 437–444 (1997)
Cohen, M., Colbourn, C., Gibbons, P., Mugridge, W.: Constructing test suites for interaction testing. In: Int’l Conf. on Softw. Eng., pp. 38–48 (2003)
Elbaum, S., Chilakamarri, K.R., Fisher II., M., Rothermel, G.: Web application characterization through directed requests. In: Int’l Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (2006)
Elbaum, S., Chilakamarri, K.R., Gopal, B., Rothermel, G.: Helping end-users “engineer” dependable web applications. In: Int’l Symp. on Softw. Reliability Eng., pp. 31–40 (2005)
Consumer top 40 sites (2006), http://www.keynote.com/solutions/performance_indices/consumer_index/consumer_40.html
Benedikt, M., Freire, J., Godefroid, P.: VeriWeb: Automatically testing dynamic web sites. In: Int’l WWW Conf. (2002)
Elbaum, S., Rothermel, G., Karre, S., Fisher II., M.: Leveraging user-session data to support web application testing. IEEE Trans. on Softw. Eng., 187–201 (2005)
Ricca, F., Tonella, P.: Analysis and testing of web applications. In: Int’l Conf. on Softw. Eng., pp. 25–34 (2001)
Software QA and Testing Resource Center: Web Test Tools (2006), http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html
Tilley, S., Shihong, H.: Evaluating the reverse engineering capabilities of web tools for understanding site content and structure: A case study. In: Int’l Conf. on Softw. Eng., pp. 514–523 (2001)
Ammons, G., Bodik, R., Larus, J.: Mining specifications. In: Symp. on Principles of Prog. Lang., pp. 4–16 (2002)
Ernst, M., Cockrell, J., Griswold, W., Notkin, D.: Dynamically discovering likely program invariants to support program evolution. In: Int’l Conf. on Softw. Eng., pp. 213–224 (1999)
Hangal, S., Lam, M.: Tracking down software bugs using automatic anomaly detection. In: Int’l Conf. on Softw. Eng., pp. 291–301 (2002)
Henkel, J., Diwan, A.: Discovering algebraic specifications from Java classes. In: Eur. Conf. on OO Prog., pp. 431–456 (2003)
Savage, S., Burrows, M., Nelson, G., Sobalvarro, P., Anderson, T.: Eraser: A dynamic data race detector for multithreaded programs. ACM Trans. on Comp. Systems 15(4), 391–411 (1997)
Yang, J., Evans, D.: Dynamically inferring temporal properties. In: Workshop on Prog. Analysis for Softw. Tools and Eng., pp. 23–28 (2004)
Pacheco, C., Ernst, M.: Eclat: Automatic generation and classification of test inputs. In: Eur. Conf. on OO Prog., pp. 504–527 (2005)
Xie, T., Notkin, D.: Tool-assisted unit test selection based on operational violations. In: Int’l Conf. on Auto. Softw. Eng., pp. 40–48 (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Fisher, M., Elbaum, S., Rothermel, G. (2007). Dynamic Characterization of Web Application Interfaces. In: Dwyer, M.B., Lopes, A. (eds) Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering. FASE 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4422. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71289-3_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71289-3_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71288-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71289-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)