Formal Structured Specification for Web Application Test School of Computer Science, Telecommunication and Information System DePaul University Xiaoping Jia Hongming Liu

Rigorous and Automatic Testing of Web Applications  Introduction  Our Approach  Test Specification  A Prototype Tool  Conclusion and Future Work

Introduction  increasing popularity of web applications  new challenges to quality assurance of web applications  conventional software testing methodologies and tools are not adequate  focus of our approach

Our Approach  WEBTEST: an approach for rigorous and automatic testing of web application.  Test Web application functionality, security and performance.  Uses formal specification based on Z notation  A test engine takes the input and perform test automatically

Our Approach WEBTEST Approach Overview

Scope of testing  Functionality  Page structure  Security  Performance

Test Specification  A Z based specification language for formally specifying the testing process and the functionality of the web applications.  A BNF grammar of the abstract syntax of the specification language is giving in the paper.  The concrete syntax of the specification language is in XML.

Test Specification  Specification Structure a test specification is a hierarchy of test suite, test case and test step; a test case is defined as a tree of test steps, each path from the root of the tree to a leaf of the tree represents a test sequence.

Specification Structure Test Case 1 ______|______________ | | _______| TC 1.1 __ ___| TC 1.2 | | | | | | TC1.1.1 | TC1.1.2 | TC1.1.3 | TC1.2.1 | TC1.2.2

Test Specification  Request and Response Specification request specification specifies a pattern of HTTP requests. response specification specifies the assertions on the HTTP response.  Predicate HTTP protocol specific predicate : Match, Contain, Comparison logical connective predicate: not, and, or, implies

Example Logon page check <match op=”contains” regexp=false select=”/html/body” value=”Logon Failed”/> <match op=”contains” regexp=”false” select=”/html/body” value=”Logon Successfully”/>

Example Logon page check in Z

A Prototype Tool

WebTest interface

Future work  Improving the ability and flexibility of test specifications  Enrich our specification language  Enhance the capability of the prototype tool WebTest

Conclusion The main contributions of our research are:  using formal specifications  versatility and flexibility  suited for incremental and iterative development processes  A prototype tool, WebTest has been developed

More information  Project site: Paper, presentation, download  Contact:

Thank you! Questions?