Dependability in Web Software

The web is an increasingly important platform used for a wide variety of tasks on a regular basis. And as the web becomes more important, the ways in which it is used grows increasingly sophisticated. End users build web pages and applications, use web applications in new and unexpected ways and use web macro tools to automate web-based tasks. All of these tasks are error-prone. In addition, they often depend on external components outside of the control of the developer or end user. Therefore we have been developing tools and methodologies to assist users with these tasks. One of our methodologies uses dynamic characterization of the web application interface to assist the application builder in finding anomalous behavior in their applications and to help users understand how they can access the application’s features. In other work, we have attempted to improve the maintainability and robustness of web macros. To do this we have developed a family of assertions that work with web macros to detect certain types of erroneous or changed behavior in the uses of web applications and indicate to the user when these assertions are violated so they can update the web macro accordingly.