Automatic Extraction and Verification of State-Models for Web Applications

Abstract

Complexity of Web applications and demand for their reliability have greatly increased over recent years as they have begun to be used in wide variety of areas, including control systems and enterprise applications. Due to short delivery times and changing requirements quality assurance of Web applications is usually an informal process. Meanwhile, formal methods have been proven to be reliable means for the specification, verification, and testing of systems. In this paper, we present an approach for automatic modelling of an existing web application using finite state machines. The paper describes a method to generate an application model by fully automatic dynamic analysis of any given existing web application combined with recorded user browsing sessions analysis. Method supports both applications with transitions between web pages and single-page applications with AJAX requests and dynamic DOM modifications. An algorithm is proposed that simplifies state model by merging similar states to achieve a human readable model even for complex real world web applications. The obtained model could be used to define formal requirements for the application, automatic model checking, documentation and test automation.