research-article

Mining behavior models from enterprise web applications

Authors:

Matthias Schur,

Andreas ZellerAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 422 - 432

https://doi.org/10.1145/2491411.2491426

Published: 18 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Today's enterprise web applications demand very high release cycles---and consequently, frequent tests. Automating these tests typically requires a behavior model: A description of the states the application can be in, the transitions between these states, and the expected results. Furthermore one needs scripts to make the abstract actions (transitions) in the model executable. As specifying such behavior models and writing the necessary scripts manually is a hard task, a possible alternative could be to extract them from existing applications. However, mining such models can be a challenge, in particular because one needs to know when two states are equivalent, as well as how to reach that state. We present ProCrawl (PROcess CRAWLer), a generic approach to mine behavior models from (multi-user) enterprise web applications. ProCrawl observes the behavior of the application through its user interface, generates and executes tests to explore unobserved behavior. In our evaluation of three non-trivial web applications (an open-source shop system, an SAP product compliance application, and an open-source conference manager), ProCrawl produces models that precisely abstract application behavior and which can be directly used for effective model-based regression testing.

References

[1]

A. Bertolino, P. Inverardi, P. Pelliccione, and M. Tivoli. Automatic Synthesis of Behavior Protocols for Composable Web-Services. In ESEC/FSE ’09, pages 141–150, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

Digital Library

[2]

A. W. Biermann and J. A. Feldman. On the synthesis of finite-state machines from samples of their behavior. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-21(6):592–597, 1972.

Digital Library

[3]

R. V. Binder. Testing Object-Oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools. Object Technology Series. Addison Wesley, 1999.

Digital Library

[4]

J. C. Corbett, M. B. Dwyer, J. Hatcliff, S. Laubach, C. S. Pasareanu, Robby, and H. Zheng. Bandera: extracting finite-state models from java source code. In ICSE ’00, pages 439–448, New York, NY, USA, 2000. ACM.

Digital Library

[5]

V. Dallmeier, M. Burger, T. Orth, and A. Zeller. Webmate: a tool for testing web 2.0 applications. In Proceedings of the Workshop on JavaScript Tools, JSTools ’12, pages 11–15, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM.

Digital Library

[6]

V. Dallmeier, N. Knopp, C. Mallon, S. Hack, and A. Zeller. Generating test cases for specification mining. In ISSTA ’10 Proceedings of the 19th international symposium on Software testing and analysis, pages 85–96, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.

Digital Library

[7]

G. de Caso, V. Braberman, D. Garbervetsky, and S. Uchitel. Automated abstractions for contract validation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 38(1):141–162, 2012.

Digital Library

[8]

M. D. Ernst, J. Cockrell, W. G. Griswold, and D. Notkin. Dynamically discovering likely program invariants to support program evolution. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 27(2):99–123, 2001.

Digital Library

[9]

C. Flanagan and K. R. M. Leino. Houdini, an annotation assistant for esc/java. In Proceedings of the International Symposium of Formal Methods Europe on Formal Methods for Increasing Software Productivity, FME ’01, pages 500–517, London, UK, 2001. Springer-Verlag.

Digital Library

[10]

M. Fowler. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA, 2002.

Digital Library

[11]

W. Grieskamp, N. Kicillof, K. Stobie, and V. Braberman. Model-based quality assurance of protocol documentation: tools and methodology. Software Testing, Verification & Reliability, 21(1):55––71, Mar. 2011.

Digital Library

[12]

F. Gross, G. Fraser, and A. Zeller. Exsyst: Search-based gui testing. In ICSE ’12, pages 1423–1426, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2012. IEEE Press.

Digital Library

[13]

A. Mesbah, A. Van Deursen, and S. Lenselink. Crawling Ajax-based web applications through dynamic analysis of user interface state changes. ACM Transactions on the Web, 6(1):1–30, Mar. 2012.

Digital Library

[14]

A. Mesbah, A. Van Deursen, and D. Roest. Invariant-based automatic testing of modern web applications. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 38(1):35–53, Jan. 2012.

Digital Library

[15]

M. Pezze and M. Young. Software Testing and Analysis: Process, Principles and Techniques. John Wiley & Sons, 2007.

Digital Library

[16]

M. P. Robillard, E. Bodden, D. Kawrykow, M. Mezini, and T. Ratchford. Automated api property inference techniques. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 39(5):613–637, May 2013.

Digital Library

[17]

M. Schur. Experimental specification mining for enterprise applications. In ESEC/FSE ’11, pages 388–391, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.

Digital Library

[18]

M. Utting and B. Legeard. Practical Model-Based Testing: A Tools Approach. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA, 2007.

Digital Library

[19]

W. M. P. van der Aalst, V. Rubin, H. M. W. Verbeek, B. F. van Dongen, E. Kindler, and C. W. Günther. Process mining: a two-step approach to balance between underfitting and overfitting. Software and System Modeling, 9(1):87–111, 2010.

[20]

S. Wieczorek and A. Stefanescu. Improving testing of enterprise systems by model-based testing on graphical user interfaces. In ECBS ’10 Proceedings of the 2010 17th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on the Engineering of Computer-Based Systems, pages 352–357, Washington, DC, USA, 2010. IEEE Computer Society.

Digital Library

[21]

T. Xie and D. Notkin. Mutually enhancing test generation and specification inference. In International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Testing of Software (FATES), pages 60–69. Springer, 2003.

[22]

T. Xie and D. Notkin. Automatic extraction of object-oriented observer abstractions from unit-test executions. In International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods (ICFEM), pages 290–305. Springer, 2004.

[23]

A. Zeller. Program analysis: A hierarchy. In ICSE Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (WODA 2003), pages 6–9, 2003.

Cited By

Wu SChang ZZhang ZLi ZLiu Y(2023)DTester: Diversity-Driven Test Case Generation for Web ApplicationsInternational Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering10.1142/S021819402350055934:02(357-390)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218194023500559
Liu XZiarek L(2023)PTDETECTOR: An Automated JavaScript Front-end Library Detector2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00049(649-660)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00049
Nguyen HPhan HKhairunnesa SNguyen SYadavally AWang SRajan HNguyen T(2022)A Hybrid Approach for Inference between Behavioral Exception API Documentation and Implementations, and Its ApplicationsProceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3551349.3560434(1-13)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551349.3560434
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

ProCrawl: mining test models from multi-user web applications
ISSTA 2014: Proceedings of the 2014 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

Today's web applications demand very high release cycles--and consequently, frequent tests. Automating these tests typically requires a behavior model: A description of the states the application can be in, the transitions between these states, and the ...
Mining Executable Specifications of Web Applications from Selenium IDE Tests
SERE '12: Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Security and Reliability

A common practice for system testing of web-based applications is to perform the test cases through a web browser. These tests are often recorded and managed by a record and replay tool, such as Selenium IDE. Mining specifications from such tests can be ...
Web applications testing techniques: a systematic mapping study

Due to the importance of web application testing techniques for detecting faults and assessing quality attributes, many research papers were published in this field. For this reason, it became essential to analyse, classify and summarise the research in ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ESEC/FSE 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

August 2013

738 pages

ISBN:9781450322379

DOI:10.1145/2491411

General Chair:
Bertrand Meyer
ETH Zurich, Switzerland
,
Program Chairs:
Luciano Baresi
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
,
Mira Mezini
TU Darmstadt, Germany

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 August 2013

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ESEC/FSE'13

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE'13: Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 18 - 26, 2013

Saint Petersburg, Russia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 112 of 543 submissions, 21%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

38
Total Citations
View Citations
643
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)10
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 08 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Wu SChang ZZhang ZLi ZLiu Y(2023)DTester: Diversity-Driven Test Case Generation for Web ApplicationsInternational Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering10.1142/S021819402350055934:02(357-390)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218194023500559
Liu XZiarek L(2023)PTDETECTOR: An Automated JavaScript Front-end Library Detector2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00049(649-660)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00049
Nguyen HPhan HKhairunnesa SNguyen SYadavally AWang SRajan HNguyen T(2022)A Hybrid Approach for Inference between Behavioral Exception API Documentation and Implementations, and Its ApplicationsProceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3551349.3560434(1-13)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551349.3560434
Afzal AMotwani MStolee KBrun YLe Goues C(2021)SOSRepair: Expressive Semantic Search for Real-World Program RepairIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.294491447:10(2162-2181)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2944914
Prasetya IKlomp R(2021)Test model coverage analysis under uncertainty: extended versionSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-020-00848-9Online publication date: 9-Feb-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-020-00848-9
Beschastnikh ILiu PXing AWang PBrun YErnst M(2020)Visualizing Distributed System ExecutionsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/337563329:2(1-38)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3375633
Wang WGuo XLi ZZhao R(2019)Test Case Generation Based on Client-Server of Web Applications by Memetic Algorithm2019 IEEE 30th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE.2019.00029(206-216)Online publication date: Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE.2019.00029
Motwani MBrun YAtlee JBultan TWhittle J(2019)Automatically generating precise Oracles from structured natural language specificationsProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2019.00035(188-199)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00035
Li SJia ZLi YLiao XXu ELiu XHe HGao L(2019)Detecting Performance Bottlenecks Guided by Resource UsageIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29365997(117839-117849)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2936599
Prasetya IKlomp R(2019)Test Model Coverage Analysis Under UncertaintySoftware Engineering and Formal Methods10.1007/978-3-030-30446-1_12(222-239)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30446-1_12
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten