Automatic exploration and testing of dynamic Web sites

• US 20040059809A1
• Filed: 09/23/2002
• Published: 03/25/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 09/23/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: WSOU Investments, LLC (WSOU Holdings, LLC)
• Original Assignee: Alcatel-Lucent USA, Inc. (Nokia Corporation)
• Inventors: Godefroid, Patrice Ismael, Benedikt, Michael Abraham, Silva, Juliana Freire, Vyas, Avinash
• Granted Patent: US 7,716,322 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/224
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques

Abstract

A unique tool, i.e., “VeriWeb”, is employed to automatically discover and systematically explore Web-site execution paths that can be followed by a user in a Web application. Unlike traditional spiders (or crawlers) that are limited to the exploration of static links, VeriWeb can navigate automatically through dynamic components of Web sites, including form submissions and execution of client-side scripts. Whenever examining a new Web page, the system determines all possible actions a user might perform—be it a link, via a button with a JavaScript handler, or via form submission—and can execute them in a systematic way. In order to systematically test different paths in a Web site, VeriWeb addresses two critical problems: systematic Web site exploration and automatically filling out forms.

Claims

1. A method for use in the exploration and testing of Web-sites including the steps of:

systematically exploring a dynamic Web site, said Web site including one or more dynamically generated Web pages;

including

determining possible user actions that may be performed in a Web page,

determining if any of said user actions correspond to at least one form,

if so, automatically generating user values to populate said at least one form,

automatically and systematically executing said determined user actions, and

testing results of said execution for errors.

2. The method as defined in claim 1 further including initializing exploration from a predetermined initial uniform resource locator (URL), discovering and executing user actions, storing said executed user actions, storing states that have been explored, detecting when either a prescribed state space depth is reached or that an error has been detected, and as a result of said detecting, re-initializing said exploration from said predetermined initial URL.

4. The method as defined in claim 1 wherein said step of exploring includes exhaustively exploring the Web site.

5. The method as defined in claim 1 wherein said step of exploring includes controlling said exploration by user-defined rules that specify user actions that should be ignored.

6. The method as defined in claim 1 wherein said user actions include at least one or more of these actions following links, filling out forms, submitting said filled out forms, executing script functions associated with objects in the at least one Web page or the like.

7. The method as defined in claim 1 wherein said step of testing includes a step of testing for navigation errors.

8. The method as defined in claim 1 wherein said errors are hypertext markup language (HTML) errors.

9. The method as defined in claim 1 wherein said errors are hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) errors.

10. The method as defined in claim 1 wherein said step of testing includes testing for user-defined error conditions.

11. The method as defined in claim 2 wherein said data-model is specified using a grouped set of pairs of string patterns defining attribute names and the associated set of possible user values.

12. The method as defined in claim 1 wherein said step of automatically generating user values includes performing a form analysis to generate a form schema, employing said form schema and profiles from an active profile list to match said form to a data-model and to generate a set of partial matches, selecting a match from said set of partial matches, for said selected match generating a set of completions, and selecting a completion from said set, thereby completing said form.

13. The method as defined in claim 1 wherein a choice of action is selected by

(a) obtaining a current Web page,

(b) testing said current Web page for errors,

(c) if no error is detected in step (b), determining if said current Web page has been tested before and, if not, selecting a choice of action in the current Web page,

(d) executing the selected choice of action,

(e) determining if there is any error in execution of said choice of action,

(f) if no error is detected in (e), return to step (a) and repeat, and

(g) if an error is detected in (e), logging said error.

14. The method as defined in claim 1 wherein when an error is detected while exploring a Web site a scenario defining a state-space path from the an initial Web page to the error is stored for later use as desired.

15. The method as defined in claim 14 wherein said error is a navigation error and/or a page error.

3. The method as defined in claim I wherein said step of automatically generating user values includes matching prescribed attributes of said at least one form against a prescribed data model in order to generate said user values.