Structural testing of Web applications

Abstract

In recent years, Web applications have become prevalent around the world. Many companies have developed or integrated their mission-critical applications using Web technologies. As Web applications become more complex, testing Web applications becomes crucial. We extend data flow testing techniques to Web applications. Several data flow issues for analyzing HTML and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents in Web applications are discussed. An approach to supporting data flow testing for Web applications is presented. In our approach, the structural test artifacts of a Web application are captured in a Web Application Test Model (WATM) where each component of the Web application is treated as an object. The elements of an HTML or XML document are considered as structured variables within an object. Data flow test cases for Web applications are derived from flow graphs in five levels according to the types of definition-use chains for the variables of interest.