An evaluation of the effectiveness of the atomic section model

Abstract

Society increasingly depends on web applications for business and pleasure. As the use of web applications continues to increase, the number of failures, some minor and some major, continues to grow. A significant problem is that we still have relatively weak abilities to test web applications. Traditional testing techniques do not adequately model or test these novel technologies. The atomic section model (ASM), models web applications to support design, analysis, and testing. This paper presents an empirical study to evaluate the effectiveness of the ASM. The model was implemented into a tool, WASP, which extracts the ASM from the implementation and supports various test criteria. We studied ten web applications, totaling 156 components and 11,829 lines of code. UsingWASP, we generated 207 tests, which revealed 31 faults. Seventeen of those faults exposed internal information about the application and server.