Rigorous and Automatic Testing of Web Applications

As web applications become more and more prevalent, the quality assurance of web applications has become more and more important. Due to the complexity of the underlying technologies of web applications, it is more challenging to test web applications than conventional software. It is critical to develop effective methodologies and tools for testing web applications. In this paper, we propose an approach for rigorous and automatic testing of web applications using formal specifications. Our formal specification based approach is powerful, extensible, and versatile. It intends to address testing of various aspects of web applications, including functionality, security, and performance. We have developed a prototype tool based on the proposed approach, which accepts formal specifications in XML syntax as input, automatically generates test cases, executes the test cases and validates the test results.