The increased availability and continuous use of the web for daily operations by businesses, consumers, and government has popularized e-commerce and created a great demand for reliable web applications. One promising approach to testing the functionality of web applications leverages user accesses collected by web servers. Some of the goals of this research are

• To perform scalable test suite reduction of user sessions and generate reduced suites that are efficient in terms of program coverage and fault detection ability.
• To perform dynamic analysis of user sessions to understand the usage and dynamic behavior of web applications and to motivate the reduction techniques developed.
• To develop a customizable, automated framework for scalable testing of web applications. We have developed pluggable oracle comparators, test-case replay mechanisms, and test-case generation algorithms that plug into this framework.

• Sara Sprenkle, Lori Pollock, Holly Esquivel, Barbara Hazelwood, and Stacey Ecott. “Automated Oracle Comparators for Testing Web Applications.” 18th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, IEEE, November 2007.

• Sreedevi Sampath, Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Lori Pollock, and Amie Souter Greenwald. “Applying Concept Analysis to User-session-based Testing of Web Applications.” Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 33, No. 10, pp. 643-658. IEEE. October 2007.

• Sreedevi Sampath, Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, and Lori Pollock. “Web Application Testing with Customized Test Requirements–An Experimental Comparison Study.” International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE ‘06). November 2006.

• Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Sreedevi Sampath, and Lori Pollock. “Automated Replay and Failure Detection for Web Applications.” International Conference of Automated Software Engineering, IEEE/ACM, pp. 253–262. November 2005.

Complete List of Our Publications

• Faculty: Lori Pollock
• Ph.D. Student: Emily Gibson Hill
• Collaborators: Dr. Sreedevi Sampath (UMBC), Dr. Amie Souter (Lucent), and Dr. Sara Sprenkle (W&L)
• Past Undergraduate Students: Stacey Ecott (Tufts University), Holly Esquivel (University of Nebraska-Kearney), Barbara Hazelwood (Xavier University), Valentin Mihaylov (Drexel University), Frank Zappaterrini