Using a Petri net model approach to web applications testing

Web applications are complex and growing rapidly along with the emergence of Internet and newly developed web technologies. The quality of web applications has become crucial to their success and thus should be tested thoroughly. In this paper, we describe how the all-edges testing of a web application is facilitated by creating a state transition diagram to model various interactions among web pages of each subsystem and then transform the diagram into a corresponding web Petri net machine (WPNM). Test cases can then be generated based on the reachability trees resulted from the corresponding WPNMs. We also generalize an existing statistical testing technique to all-k-paths and all-edges testing of web applications to enhance the reliability of structural testing.