EXTRACTING STATE MODELS OF WEB APPLICATIONS

Over recent years complexity of Web Applications and demand for their reliability have greatly increased as they have begun to be used in wide variety of areas including social networks, online banking, control systems and other critical systems. Modern web applications could often contain confidential information and perform financial transactions therefore they are expected to be safe and secure.  Due to short delivery times and changing requirements quality assurance of Web applications is usually an informal process. Meanwhile, formal methods have been proven to be reliable means for the specification, verification, and testing of systems. 

In this paper, we propose an approach that would make it possible to use Model Checking and Model-based testing for web applications. A technique is developed, that could generate finite state model by fully automatic dynamic analysis of any given existing web application. Method supports both applications with transitions between web pages and single-page applications with AJAX requests and dynamic DOM modifications. Two different algorithms are proposed that simplify state model by merging similar states to achieve a human readable models even for complex real world web applications. 

The obtained model could be used to define formal requirements for the application, automatic model checking, documentation and test automation.