Analysis and Testing of Web Applications

The economic relevance of Web applications increases the importance of controlling and improving their quality. Moreover, the new available technologies for their development allow the insertion of sophisticated functions, but often leave the developers responsible for their organization and evolution. As a consequence, a high demand is emerging for methodologies and tools for quality assurance of Web based systems. In this paper, a UML model of Web applications is proposed for their high level representation. Such a model is the starting point for several analyses, which can help in the assessment of the static site structure. Moreover, it drives Web application testing, in that it can be exploited to define white box testing criteria and to semi-automatically generate the associated test cases. The proposed techniques were applied to several real world Web applications. Results suggest that an automatic support to the verification and validation activities can be extremely beneficial. In fact, it guarantees that all relevant paths in the site are properly exercised before its delivery. The high level of automation that is achieved in test case generation and execution increases the number of tests that are conducted and simplifies the regression checks