Automated Functional Testing based on the Navigation of Web Applications

Web applications are becoming more and more complex. Testing such applications is an intricate hard and time-consuming activity. Therefore, testing is often poorly performed or skipped by practitioners. Test automation can help to avoid this situation. Hence, this paper presents a novel approach to perform automated software testing for web applications based on its navigation. On the one hand, web navigation is the process of traversing a web application using a browser. On the other hand, functional requirements are actions that an application must do. Therefore, the evaluation of the correct navigation of web applications results in the assessment of the specified functional requirements. The proposed method to perform the automation is done in four levels: test case generation, test data derivation, test case execution, and test case reporting. This method is driven by three kinds of inputs: i) UML models; ii) Selenium scripts; iii) XML files. We have implemented our approach in an open-source testing framework named Automatic Testing Platform. The validation of this work has been carried out by means of a case study, in which the target is a real invoice management system developed using a model-driven approach.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2011, arXiv:1108.208

A dataflow platform for applications based on Linked Data

Modern software applications increasingly benefit from accessing the multifarious and heterogeneous Web of Data, thanks to the use of web APIs and Linked Data principles. In previous work, the authors proposed a platform to develop applications consuming Linked Data in a declarative and modular way. This paper describes in detail the functional language the platform gives access to, which is based on SPARQL (the standard query language for Linked Data) and on the dataflow paradigm. The language features interactive and meta-programming capabilities so that complex modules/applications can be developed. By adopting a declarative style, it favours the development of modules that can be reused in various specific execution context

GOREWEB framework for goal oriented requirements engineering of web applications

In this paper, we propose a framework for modeling goal driven requirements of web applications. Web engineers mostly focus on design aspects only overlooking the real goals and expectations of the user. Goal oriented Requirement Engineering is a popular approach for Information system development but has not been explored much for Web applications. However, in today's times Web is dominating in every business making it imperative that its requirements are analyzed carefully and in profundity. Goal driven requirements analysis helps in capturing stakeholders' goals very finely, by choosing between alternatives and resolving conflicts. Detailed classification of both functional and non-functional requirements specific to web applications is discussed in the presented work. A framework, GOREWEB (Goal oriented Requirements Engineering for Web Applications) is proposed for analyzing goals and translating them into functional and non-functional web requirements

Identifying and Modelling Complex Workflow Requirements in Web Applications

Workflow plays a major role in nowadays business and therefore its requirement elicitation must be accurate and clear for achieving the solution closest to business’s needs. Due to Web applications popularity, the Web is becoming the standard platform for implementing business workflows. In this context, Web applications and their workflows must be adapted to market demands in such a way that time and effort are minimize. As they get more popular, they must give support to different functional requirements but also they contain tangled and scattered behaviour. In this work we present a model-driven approach for modelling workflows using a Domain Specific Language for Web application requirement called WebSpec. We present an extension to WebSpec based on Pattern Specifications for modelling crosscutting workflow requirements identifying tangled and scattered behaviour and reducing inconsistencies early in the cycle

Privacy-Preserving Reengineering of Model-View-Controller Application Architectures Using Linked Data

When a legacy system’s software architecture cannot be redesigned, implementing additional privacy requirements is often complex, unreliable and costly to maintain. This paper presents a privacy-by-design approach to reengineer web applications as linked data-enabled and implement access control and privacy preservation properties. The method is based on the knowledge of the application architecture, which for the Web of data is commonly designed on the basis of a model-view-controller pattern. Whereas wrapping techniques commonly used to link data of web applications duplicate the security source code, the new approach allows for the controlled disclosure of an application’s data, while preserving non-functional properties such as privacy preservation. The solution has been implemented and compared with existing linked data frameworks in terms of reliability, maintainability and complexity

Performance Rubrics for Robustness Evaluation of Web Mutation Operators

Web Applications are the predominant medium for not only business enterprises but also for service-based sector to establish and continue their online presence. However, the robustness of web application is mandatory in seamless interaction with customers for achieving sustainable business. Intruders and unethical hackers keep trying to gain unauthentic access to the web applications and hence it is more necessary for the web application to be resistant against any such attacks. The strength of a web application is indirectly responsible for gaining customer confidence leading to repeat business as well as attracting new customers for profitable longer run. Once the web application gains credibility it is bound to run successfully. In the current work, an attempt has been made to assess the robustness of mutation operators used to test web applications is made. A few rubrics have been proposed to ascertain the strength of projected mutation operators verified on some sample open-source web applications. The functional attributes of a web application are the functionalities offered by the web application. The non-functional attributes of a typical web application are security, performance, availability. Here, web applications are challenged against the afore mentioned non-functional attributes using rubrics like uniformity, uniqueness, reliability, unpredictability, and entropy. A comprehensive analysis has been made for the robustness of the projected web operators against the designed and formulated rubrics

Asterias: a parallelized web-based suite for the analysis of expression and aCGH data

Asterias (\url{http://www.asterias.info}) is an integrated collection of freely-accessible web tools for the analysis of gene expression and aCGH data. Most of the tools use parallel computing (via MPI). Most of our applications allow the user to obtain additional information for user-selected genes by using clickable links in tables and/or figures. Our tools include: normalization of expression and aCGH data; converting between different types of gene/clone and protein identifiers; filtering and imputation; finding differentially expressed genes related to patient class and survival data; searching for models of class prediction; using random forests to search for minimal models for class prediction or for large subsets of genes with predictive capacity; searching for molecular signatures and predictive genes with survival data; detecting regions of genomic DNA gain or loss. The capability to send results between different applications, access to additional functional information, and parallelized computation make our suite unique and exploit features only available to web-based applications.Comment: web based application; 3 figure

Model2Roo: A Model Driven Approach for Web Application Development based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework and Spring Roo

International audienceInherent complexity in web application development is continually increasing due to changes in both functional and non-functional requirements, as well as to technological changes like new programming languages, tools, frameworks and development processes. An adequate management of this complexity is required in order to generate high quality software systems. In this paper, an approach based on model-driven techniques is proposed to guide the development of web applications, by focusing on model abstractions rather than implementation details. In order to do so, we propose a set of model extensions, such as profiles and annotations, to describe both the static structure and a subset of functional and non-functional requirements usually associated to web applications

A Framework for Dynamic Web Services Composition

Dynamic composition of web services is a promising approach and at the same time a challenging research area for the dissemination of service-oriented applications. It is widely recognised that service semantics is a key element for the dynamic composition of Web services, since it allows the unambiguous descriptions of a service's capabilities and parameters. This paper introduces a framework for performing dynamic service composition by exploiting the semantic matchmaking between service parameters (i.e., outputs and inputs) to enable their interconnection and interaction. The basic assumption of the framework is that matchmaking enables finding semantic compatibilities among independently defined service descriptions. We also developed a composition algorithm that follows a semantic graph-based approach, in which a graph represents service compositions and the nodes of this graph represent semantic connections between services. Moreover, functional and non-functional properties of services are considered, to enable the computation of relevant and most suitable service compositions for some service request. The suggested end-to-end functional level service composition framework is illustrated with a realistic application scenario from the IST SPICE project