EFSM-Oriented Minimal Traces Set Generation Approach for Web Applications

Most of web applications models focus on sequencing of events, where the ignored parameters or DOM elements changes and the relationship between the execution conditions and web states are crucial for analyzing and testing the behavior of client-side of client-server web applications. In this paper, we first define a novel trace, which can represent dynamic behaviors of web applications more accurately. Then an EFSM-oriented minimal traces set generation approach is proposed for modelling web applications. In order to ensure the integrity of the EFSM model and improve the effectiveness of the modelling process, three adequacy criteria with respect to all events, JS branches and DOM structures, are applied to compensate the traces and to guide the minimal traces set generation by greedy algorithm. Finally, the minimal traces set is abstracted into an EFSM as the behavior model for web applications. We implement a prototype tool for the proposed approach and empirically evaluate that the minimal traces set generation approach based on two web applications. The results show that the traces generated by the approach is effective and the all JavaScript branches coverage criteria is most appropriate to select the minimal traces set used for modelling.