Testing concurrent user behavior of synchronous web applications with Petri nets

Web applications are now used in every aspect of our lives to manage work, provide products and services, read email, and provide entertainment. The software technologies used to build web applications provide features that help designers provide flexible functionality, but that are challenging to m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Software and systems modeling Vol. 18; no. 2; pp. 913 - 936
Main Authors: Offutt, Jeff, Thummala, Sunitha
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.04.2019
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Applications programs
Compilers
Computer Science
Concurrency
Faults
Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet)
Interpreters
IT in Business
Model testing
Petri nets
Programming Languages
Programming Techniques
Software Engineering
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Software reviews
Software upgrading
Statelessness
Theme Section Paper
Web applications
Test criteria
Model-based testing
Petri nets
ISSN:1619-1366, 1619-1374
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Web applications are now used in every aspect of our lives to manage work, provide products and services, read email, and provide entertainment. The software technologies used to build web applications provide features that help designers provide flexible functionality, but that are challenging to model and test. In particular, the network-based request-response model of programming means that web applications are inherently “stateless” and implicitly concurrent. They are stateless because a new network connection is made for each request (for example, when a user clicks a submit button). Thus, the server does not, by default, recognize multiple requests from the same user. Web applications are also concurrent because multiple users can use the same web application at the same time, creating contention for the same resources. Unfortunately, most web application testing does not adequately evaluate these aspects of web applications, leaving many software faults in deployed web applications. Part of this problem is because most traditional software modeling tools (such as UML) do not have built-in support for the stateless and concurrent aspects of web applications. This research project uses a novel model that is based on Petri nets to describe certain aspects of the behavior of web applications. This paper makes several contributions. We present a novel technique to design tests from this model that explicitly tests concurrency in web applications. We present novel coverage criteria that are defined on the Petri net model. We present results from an empirical study of 18 web applications with 343 components and 30,186 lines of code, followed by a case study on a large industrial web application. The tests found significantly more faults than traditional requirements-based tests, with fewer tests.
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ISSN:1619-1366
1619-1374
DOI:10.1007/s10270-018-0655-8