An Oracle based on Image Comparison for Regression Testing of Web Applications

With conventional regression test tools for Web applications, it is difficult to specify the values to be verified that are repeated output inside loop statements. We need to select each of these values displayed in Web pages with the mouse. This paper presents a method that automates regression testing of Web applications on the server side. This method makes it easy to specify values to be verified and enables us to specify them when we develop Web applications. We can directly check the verification results on the Web pages that are shown in the Web browser. If we find a fault, we can even directly modify a part of the server program in the Web browser that corresponds to the currently displayed Web page.

In most cases, web applications communicate with web services (SOAP and RESTful). The former act as a front-end to the latter, which contain the business logic. A hacker might not have direct access to those web services (e.g., they are not on public networks), but can still provide malicious inputs to the web application, thus potentially compromising related services. Typical examples are XML injection attacks that target SOAP communications. In this paper, we present a novel, search-based approach used to generate test data for a web application in an attempt to deliver malicious XML messages to web services. Our goal is thus to detect XML injection vulnerabilities in web applications. The proposed approach is evaluated on two studies, including an industrial web application with millions of users. Results show that we are able to effectively generate test data (e.g., input values in an HTML form) that detect such vulnerabilities.

A relevant consequence of the expansion of the web and e-commerce is the growth of the demand of new web sites and web applications. As a result, web sites and applications are usually developed without a formalized process, and web pages are directly coded in an incremental way, where new pages are obtained by duplicating existing ones. Duplicated web pages, having the same structure and just differing for the data they include, can be considered as clones. The identification of clones may reduce the effort devoted to test, maintain and evolve web sites and applications. Moreover, clone detection among different web sites aims to detect cases of possible plagiarism. In this paper we propose an approach. based on similarity metrics, to detect duplicated pages in web sites and applications, implemented with HTML language and ASP technology. The proposed approach has been assessed by analyzing several web sites and Web applications. The obtained results are reported in the paper with respect to some case studies.

This tutorial gives an overview of Software Quality Assurance (SQA) as applied to Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems. Basic concepts of SQA are discussed, and some of the theoretical background and current state of the art are presented. A pragmatic approach to SQA in the CAD world is demonstrated by showing its application to a VLSI layout editor. Some of the topics discussed are: reliability, robustness, verification and regression testing, test strategies and generation of test data, software change control, and how to handle some of the problems encountered when many people work on the same program.

Web application have gained increased acceptance over the years in companies and organization as the world move to a global village. Software developers have also grown interest in developing web applications compared to stand-alone application because of the immense benefits it offers such as ubiquity, platform dependence, low cost of support and maintenance, better speed and performance, piracy proof etc. As mobile application emerged in the last decade, attention has been focused on mobile applications by organizations and businesses in order to maximize their profits as much as possible. There has been a rapid increase of software release in the mobile applications store. As the growth of both web application and mobile application increase, the question of quality assurance remains a concern. A comparative study of software testing techniques can be performed to improve the standard of testing of both web and mobile application. This paper therefore reviews the similarity and difference in the testing mechanism.

A regression test case prioritization (TCP) technique reorders test cases for regression testing to achieve early fault detection. Most TCP techniques have been developed for regression testing of source code in an application. Most web applications rely on a database server for serving client requests. Any changes in the database result in erroneous client interactions and may bring down the entire web application. However, most prioritization techniques are unsuitable for prioritizing test suites for early detection of changes in databases. There are very few proposals in the literature for prioritization of test cases that can detect faults in the database early. We propose a new automated TCP technique for web applications that automatically identifies the database changes, prioritizes test cases related to database changes and executes them in priority order to detect faults early.

Web application testing is concerned with numerous and complicated testing objects, methods and processes. So a testing framework fitting for the properties of Web application is needed to guide and organize all the testing tasks. Based on the analysis for Web application characters and traditional software testing process, the process for Web application testing is modeled, which describes a series of testing flows such as the testing requirement analysis, test cases generation and selection, testing execution, and testing results analysis and measurement. Furthermore, the realization techniques are also investigated so as to integrate each testing step and implement the whole testing process harmoniously and effectively. Thus the framework is suitable for the Internet environment and can guide the Web application testing actively and availably.

In recent years, the World Wide Web has become an ideal platform for developing Internet applications. World Wide Web service and application engineering is a complex task. Many web applications at present are large-scale and involve hundreds or thousands of web pages and sophisticated interactions with users and databases. Thus, improving the quality of web applications and reducing development costs are important challenges for the Internet industry. One way to resolve the difficulty is to provide web application developers with an integrated development environment. In this paper, I propose an efficient methodology and development environment for web application programs. This environment includes a design model to represent data and navigational structure, a modeling language for the notation technique of the design model, and a process model to define development stages.

Web application development from simple web pages to complex interactive platforms (including social networks, e-commerce systems, corporate portals) requires new approaches, tools and technologies. JavaScript libraries and frameworks play a special role in developing web applications, simplifying the creation of effective, scalable, and convenient interfaces. The purpose of the article is to research the problems and prospects of using React in combination with Redux when creating web applications with a complex structure, to assess the advantages of their joint use in comparison with similar tools and to develop the web application “FarmerProducts”. The research methodology consists of the main methodological approaches and technological tools for developing web applications. Such methods, in particular, are: system and comparative analysis – to identify the features of creating web applications; method of expert assessments, which involves the study of literary sources and information resources, conducting interviews and surveys of experts, as well as the processes of developing and testing scalable and high-performance web applications based on the use of React and Redux. The scientific novelty of the research is the analysis of modern tools (React, Angular, Vue. js) for developing web applications, identifying problems and prospects for their use, creating an author’s web application (using React and Redux), which includes an intuitive interface, a flexible database, simplifying the process of working with the application by using a stack of modern technologies. Conclusions. The paper analyses the problems and prospects of using modern web application development tools; focuses on React, which is suitable for different projects; conducts a comparative analysis of React with Angular, Vue. js and Svelte, identifies their main characteristics, advantages, disadvantages; demonstrates the dependence of the choice of tools on the project context (React in combination with Redux can provide an optimal balance between performance, flexibility and scalability); describes the author’s web application – the FarmerProducts online store; identifies further ways to improve this web application.

Declarative layout constraints for testing web applications

Recently, the extraordinary growth in the World Wide Web has been sweeping through business and industry. Many companies have developed or integrated their mission-critical applications using Web technologies. As Web applications become complex, testing Web applications becomes crucial. This paper extends traditional data flow testing techniques to Web applications. Several data flow issues for analyzing HTML documents in Web applications are discussed. A test model that captures data flow test artifacts of Web applications is presented. In the test model, each component of a Web application is modeled as an object. The data flow information of the Web application is captured using flow graphs. From the test model, data flow test cases for the Web application then can be derived based on the intra-object, inter-object, and inter-client perspectives.

Software engineers often use record/replay tools to enable the automated testing of web applications. Tests created in this man- ner can then be used to regression test new versions of the web applications as they evolve. Web application tests recorded by record/replay tools, however, can be quite brittle; they can easily break as applications change. For this reason, researchers have be- gun to seek approaches for automatically repairing record/replay tests. This research investigates different aspects in relation to test- ing web applications using record/replay tools. The areas that we are interested in include taxonomizing the causes behind breakages and developing automated techniques to repair breakages, creating prevention techniques to stop the occurrence of breakages and de- veloping automated frameworks for root cause analysis. Finally, we intend to evaluate all of these activities via controlled studies involving software engineers and real web application tests.

In software testing process, test data generation represents an important step for high quality software, even for mobile devices. As proposed in previous works, a potential source for random data generation is represented by the UI layout files that are used for almost all mobile platforms (Android, iOS, Windows Phone/Mobile). This paper continues the previous work and presents a test data generation system based on Android layout files. The test data generator uses DSL files as input and generates test data that conform to several testing principles. The generated test data could be stored in XML files or any format required by the testing frameworks.

We present an approach to write web applications in the programming languages Haskell [8] and Curry [6]. The web applications we propose are directly based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) – no additional protocol on top of HTTP is necessary. Although the main ideas are not new and already applied using other programming languages, we believe that features present in modern declarative languages – especially algebraic datatypes – serve well to represent resources on the web. 1 TRANSFER OF RESOURCE REPRESENTATIONS A resource is any piece of information named by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). A web application provides access to internally stored information over the Internet or accesses such information provided by other web applications. Usually, (a representation of) this information is transferred using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) [3] – possibly employing some protocol on top of it. Note that we do not primarily consider applications running inside a web browser like [4, 7, 9]. HTTP provides different methods to access resources from which the most important are the GET and the POST method. GET is used to retrieve some information, e.g., web browsers use GET to ask for the content of web pages. POST is used to send information to be processed by a server, e.g., entries in a web form can be sent to the server using POST. While processing the request, the server can update its internally stored information and usually sends back a result of this process. Web applications differ in their use of these two HTTP methods: RPC-style web applications are accessible through a single URI and communication is performed using the POST method. A representation of a procedure call is transferred to the server, which returns a representation of the result of this call as answer to the POST request. Note that both retrieval and update operations are performed using the POST method in RPC-style web applications and the interface of such applications is determined by the procedure calls that are understood by the server. Fielding [2] proposes another architectural style for web applications: He proposes to use the POST method only to update the internal state of the server and to use the GET method to purely retrieve information. Consequently, everything that should be available for retrieval by clients needs to be identified by an own URI. This is a big difference to RPC-style web applications that are usually accessible ?This work was partially supported by the German Research Council (DFG) grant Ha 2457/5-1. through a single URI. In the architectural style proposed by Fielding, a client sends an HTTP GET request to an URI to retrieve a representation of the resource identified by this URI corresponding to the current state of the server. To change this state, the client sends a POST request to the URI of the resource he wants to update. Fielding calls this architectural style Representational State Transfer (REST). The interface of a RESTful web application is given by the methods of HTTP and the URIs identifying the applications resources. In this work, we show how the interface given by the most important HTTP methods can be made available to Haskell or Curry programmers, hiding the details of HTTP communication.

Web applications are widely used in today's digital landscape, necessitating robust security measures to protect against unauthorized access by malicious users. Ensuring the security of these applications requires effectively identifying and addressing vulnerabilities. This paper proposes an automated methodology for vulnerability detection, utilizing a genetic algorithm to generate test cases, which offers greater efficiency and performance compared to resource-intensive and time-consuming manual approaches. Our research highlights the effectiveness of genetic algorithms as test data generators, leveraging insights from previous studies. Given the varying severity of Structured Query Language (SQL) injection attacks, those capable of executing destructive commands, such as the "drop" command, pose a more significant threat than those that merely disclose information. We employ both white-box and black-box testing methodologies to detect SQL injection vulnerabilities. Black box testing is utilized when the source code is unavailable, while white box testing is applied when the source code is accessible. Our findings suggest that white box testing, particularly static analysis, is more effective in identifying vulnerabilities. This study aims to enhance web application security by utilizing genetic algorithms to generate optimal test cases for vulnerability detection, providing a comprehensive approach that integrates white-box and black-box testing.