Constructing Control-Flow-Based Testing Tools for Web Application

Flexible and rich application frameworks of Web-based software design make Web-based applications more prevalent in both Internet and Intranet environments. Programmers enjoy various of Web application frameworks whose support ranging from simple user interactions based on plain client-server model, to complicated distributed-object computations based on CORBA. The varity gives user the flexibility to decide a proper framework, and leads to the demands of new support tools and testing framework to test and maintain Web applications. In this paper, a architecture is proposed to support the testing of web-based applications. The architecture covers application model extraction, test execution automation, and test design automation. In addition, a graph-based application model is also presented to model the behavior of web-based applications. With the graphic presentation, several traditional software testing techniques are extended to test Web-based applications.