Mining Behavior Models from Enterprise Web Applications
- ESEC/FSE 2013
by
Matthias Schur, Andreas Roth, Andreas Zeller
Pages 442-432, September 2013.
Abstract
Today's enterprise web applications demand very high release cycles-and consequently, frequent tests. Automating these tests typically requires a behavior model: A description of the states the application can be in, the transitions between these states, and the expected results. Furthermore one needs scripts to make the abstract actions (transitions) in the model executable. As specifying such behavior models and writing the necessary scripts manually is a hard task, a possible alternative could be to extract them from existing applications. However, mining such models can be a challenge, in particular because one needs to know when two states are equivalent, as well as how to reach that state. We present ProCrawl (Process Crawler), a generic approach to mine behavior models from (multi-user) enterprise web applications. ProCrawl observes the behavior of the applica- tion through its user interface, generates and executes tests to explore unobserved behavior. In our evaluation of three non-trivial web applications (an open-source shop system, an SAP product compliance application, and an open-source conference manager), ProCrawl produces models that precisely abstract application behavior and which can be directly used for effective model-based regression testing.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{schur-fse-2013,
title = "Mining Behavior Models from Enterprise Web Applications",
author = "Matthias Schur and Andreas Roth and Andreas Zeller",
year = "2013",
month = sep,
location = "Saint Petersburg, Russia",
pages = "442--432",
}