Talking about a mutation-based reverse engineering for Web testing: A preliminary experiment

One of the most well known and used approach to dynamically analyze a Web application requires to the user to analyze code and requirements of the application to extract its scenarios and the needed inputs. This information is used to exercise the application behavior and so build its model. Hence, high knowledge and effort, are required to apply that kind of analysis. Moreover, it is well recognized that a dynamic approach builds partial models since it is strictly related to the application execution. In this paper, we talk about an approach that uses code mutation to reverse engineer a Web application and build its model then used for testing. We document an experiment done to evaluate feasibility and effectiveness of that approach comparing it with other traditional ones. The results show that the approach automatically builds models containing a limited degree of inaccuracy that can be pruned during the application testing. © 2008 IEEE.