Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A related difference between the development of web sites or web-based appli-
cations and that for traditional software systems is the increasingly faster pace and
evolving nature of the former. Traditionally, large software systems take years to
develop by a large group of professional developers, with the testing part typically
consuming from a quarter to over half of the total development time and/or resources.
In contrast, web sites and web-based applications can be set up and start running
within a few weeks or even a few days by a small group of web developers. The
dynamic web environment allows web site owners and contents providers to add,
update, or change web contents, functions, and structures incrementally. All the test-
ing sub-phases before product release for traditional software systems are condensed
for the web environment, but post-release web site maintenance and related testing
play an increasingly important role. This environment also provides opportunities
for us to capture actual usage scenarios and patterns for effective web testing and
reliability improvement for operational web site, as we describe in Section 5 .
In addition, navigational facility is a central part of web-based applications, with
the most commonly used HTML (hyper-text markup language) documents playing
a central role in providing both information and navigational links. In this respect,
web-based applications resemble many traditional menu-driven software products.
The most commonly used testing technique for menu-driven software is the one
based on finite-state machines (FSMs), where each menu is represented as a state in
an FSM [6,48] . We next compare web-based applications to traditional menu-drive
software products:
Traditional menu-driven software still focuses on some computation; while
web-based applications focus on information and documents.
Traditional menu-driven software usually separates its navigation from its com-
putation; while the two are tightly mingled for web-based applications.
In traditional menu-driven software, there is usually a single top menu that
serves as the entry point; while for web-based applications, potentially any web
page can be the starting point. Similar differences exist for the end points or
final states, with traditional menu-driven software having limited exits while
web-based applications typically can end at any point when the user chooses to
exit the web browser or stop browsing.
There is a qualitative difference in the huge number of navigational pages even
for moderately sized web sites and the limited number of menus for traditional
menu-driven applications. We will revisit this key difference in Section 5 in
connection with selective web testing.
Web-based applications typically involve much more diverse support facilities
than traditional menu-driven software. Web functionalities are typically distrib-
uted across multiple layers and subsystems, ranging from web browsers at the
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