Automated web crawlers can be used to explore and exercise portions of a web application under test. However, the possibility to achieve full exploration of a web application through automated crawling is severely limited by the choice of the input values submitted with forms. Depending on the crawler's capabilities, a larger or smaller portion of web application will be automatically explored. In this paper, we introduce web crawl ability metrics to quantify properties of application pages and forms that affect crawl ability. Moreover, we show that our metrics can be used to identify the boundaries between those parts of the application that can be successfully crawled automatically and those parts that will require manual intervention or other crawl ability support. We have validated our crawl ability metrics on real web applications, for which low crawl ability was indeed associated with the existence of pages never exercised during automated crawling. © 2012 IEEE.
Crawlability metrics for web applications / Alshahwan, N.; Harman, M.; Marchetto, A.; Tiella, R.; Tonella, P.. - (2012), pp. 151-160. (Intervento presentato al convegno 5th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2012 tenutosi a Montreal, QC, can nel 2012) [10.1109/ICST.2012.95].
Crawlability metrics for web applications
Marchetto A.;
2012-01-01
Abstract
Automated web crawlers can be used to explore and exercise portions of a web application under test. However, the possibility to achieve full exploration of a web application through automated crawling is severely limited by the choice of the input values submitted with forms. Depending on the crawler's capabilities, a larger or smaller portion of web application will be automatically explored. In this paper, we introduce web crawl ability metrics to quantify properties of application pages and forms that affect crawl ability. Moreover, we show that our metrics can be used to identify the boundaries between those parts of the application that can be successfully crawled automatically and those parts that will require manual intervention or other crawl ability support. We have validated our crawl ability metrics on real web applications, for which low crawl ability was indeed associated with the existence of pages never exercised during automated crawling. © 2012 IEEE.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione