Automated identification of parameter mismatches in web applications

  • Authors:

  • William G. J. Halfond;Alessandro Orso

  • Affiliations:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology;Georgia Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Quality assurance techniques for web applications have become increasingly important as web applications have gained in popularity and become an essential part of our daily lives. To integrate content and data from multiple sources, the components of a web application communicate extensively among themselves. Unlike traditional program modules, the components communicate through interfaces and invocations that are not explicitly declared. Because of this, the communication between two components can fail due to a parameter mismatch between the interface invoked by a calling component and the interface provided by the called component. Parameter mismatches can cause serious errors in the web application and are difficult to identify using traditional testing and verification techniques. To address this problem, we propose a static-analysis based approach for identifying parameter mismatches. We also present an empirical evaluation of the approach, which we performed on a set of real web applications. The results of the evaluation are promising; our approach discovered 133 parameter mismatches in the subject applications.