Iv List of Figures List of Tables Chapter One 1.0 Introduction Chapter Two 2.0 Scope and Motivation

A study from the Business Internet Group San Francisco (BIG-SF) [2, 3] found approximately 70% of websites contain bugs and suffer some kind of failure; not only commercial websites but also US government managed websites. These faults reside in both static pages and dynamic pages. In this survey paper, we review how the existing web application testing methods test static and dynamic pages. It is our objective to better understand why testers are unable to reveal these faults. As a result, we suggest a novel approach for web applications testing. In 1990, the first web browser Nexus was born. At that time, no one considered web application testing, perhaps because of simplicity and very limited application features. A web application is an application that is accessed via a web browser using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over a network such as the Internet or intranet. To be more precise, HTTP is a stateless request and response protocol between clients and servers. An HTTP client (the browser) makes an initial request to an HTTP server (the web server) via Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) establishing a connection on port 80 by default. An HTTP server listens to this port and sends the request message (application) to the HTTP client. Nowadays, web applications have become more sophisticated and complicated than ever before. Many legacy software systems have also been migrated to web-based systems. Web applications tend to change more rapidly with shorter development times (time-to-market concerns) than traditional software. The short lifecycle of web application software is normally three to six months [24]. According to a study from the Business Internet Group San Francisco (BIG-SF), of forty-one web sites under US government management, twenty-eight (68.29%) contained bugs that caused web application failures [2]. These faults reside in the web documents (static pages and dynamic pages). The failures are the file not found error and incorrect data responses. Have these websites been tested before being put on the web server? As government managed websites, time-to-market constraint should be less than for commercial business websites. Does this mean that the failure rate of commercial websites are better or worse? The answer to this question was revealed on November 22, 2002, the biggest shopping day of the year – the day after Thanksgiving. The Black Friday report [3] stated consumers spent $196 million online shopping. This report also stated that 72.5% of the websites suffered some …