Testing web database applications

Abstract

Commercial, scientific, and social activities are increasingly becoming dependent on Web database applications. New testing techniques that handle the unique features of these systems are needed. To that end, we have extended AGENDA, a tool set for testing relational database applications, to test web database applications. Application source code is analyzed to extract relevant information about the URLs and their parameters. This information is used to construct and simplify a graph in which nodes represent URLs and edges represent links between URLs. A set of paths through the graph is selected and test cases are generated for each path. The extracted information about the parameters to each URL (e.g., values that an application user would enter into a form), is used to guide AGENDA to generate inputs for the URLs. The URLs on a path and their inputs are stored in an XML file, which is then automatically executed. The current implementation is targeted toward web applications written as Java Servlets and uses an algorithm based on cyclomatic complexity to generate paths. Preliminary empirically evaluation based on the TPC-W benchmark is presented.