VeriWeb: Automatically Testing Dynamic Web Sites
Michael Benedikt, Juliana Freire, Patrice Godefroid · 2002
Web sites are becoming increasingly complex as more and more services and information are made available over the Internet and intranets. At the same time, the correct behavior of sites has become crucial to the success of businesses and organizations and thus should be tested thoroughly and frequently. Although traditional software testing is already a notoriously hard, time-consuming and expensive process, testing Web sites presents even greater challenges: Web interfaces are very dynamic; the environment of Web applications is more complex than that of typical monolithic or client-server applications; Web applications, most notably e-commerce sites, have a large number of users who have no training on how to use the application and hence are more likely to exercise it in unpredictable ways. Existing testing tools for automating the process of testing dynamic Web sites require the specification of test scenarios, which results in limited test coverage. In this paper, we present an overview of VeriWeb, a tool for automatically discovering and systematically exploring Web-site execution paths that can be followed by a user in a Web application. Unlike traditional crawlers which are limited to the exploration of static links, VeriWeb can navigate automatically through dynamic components of Web sites, including form submissions and execution of client-side script.