A Combinatorial Approach to Building Navigation Graphs for Dynamic Web Applications

Published

September 20, 2009

Author(s)

Raghu N. Kacker, David R. Kuhn, James F. Lawrence, Wenhua Wang, Yu Lei, Sreedevi Sampath

Abstract

Modeling the navigation structure of a dynamic web application is a challenging task because of the presence of dynamic pages. In particular, there are two problems to be dealt with: (1) the page explosion problem, i.e., the number of dynamic pages may be huge or even infinite; and (2) the request generation problem, i.e., many dynamic pages may not be reached unless appropriate user requests are supplied. As a user request typically consists of multiple parameter values, the request generation problem can be further divided into two problems: (1) How to select appropriate values for individual parameters? (2) How to effectively combine individual parameter values to generate requests? This paper presents a combinatorial approach to building a navigation graph. We report a prototype tool called Tansuo, and apply the tool to five open source web applications. Our empirical results indicate that Tansuo can efficiently generate web navigation graphs for these applications.

Proceedings Title

25th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM)

Conference Dates

September 20-26, 2009

Conference Location

Edmonton

Conference Title

Proceedings of ICSM

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

combinatorial testing, navigation graphs, software testing, web application testing

Citation

Kacker, R. , Kuhn, D. , Lawrence, J. , , W. , Lei, Y. and Sampath, S. (2009), A Combinatorial Approach to Building Navigation Graphs for Dynamic Web Applications, 25th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), Edmonton, -1, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=902865 (Accessed October 13, 2025)