Building a Tool for the Analysis and Testing of Web Applications: Problems and Solutions

Web applications are becoming increasingly complex and important for companies. Their design, development, analysis and testing need therefore to be approached by means of support tools and methodologies. In this paper we consider the problems related to building tools for the analysis and testing of Web applications and we try to provide some indications on possible solutions, based upon our experience in the development of the tools ReWeb and TestWeb. The definition of a proper reference model will be discussed, as well as the impact of dynamic pages during Web site downloading and subsequent model construction. Visualization techniques addressing the large amount of extracted data will be presented, while infeasibility problems will be considered with reference to the testing phas