Assuring quality of web-based applications

The Internet is rapidly expanding into all sectors of our society and becoming an indispensable platform of information systems and other computer applications. Web-based applications are complex, ever evolving and rapidly updated software systems. Testing and maintaining web-based applications impose a challenge to existing software quality assurance and testing techniques because the Internet is a heterogeneous, distributed, multiplatform, multilingual, multimedia, autonomous, and cooperative wide area network computing environment. Traditional quality models, testing methods and tools are not adequate for web-based applications because they do not address problems associated with the new features of web-based applications. With support from and in conjunction with IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conferences (COMPSAC), a series of international workshops on Quality Assurance and Testing of Web-based Applications (QATWBA) was launched in September 2004. In particular, the first and the second QATWBA workshops were successfully held at COMPSAC’04 in Hong Kong and COMPSAC’05 in Edinburgh, respectively. The third workshop of the series will take place at COMPSAC’06 in Chicago in September 2006. This special issue contains five papers recommended by the program committees of the first two workshops. These papers have been substantially revised and extended and reviewed by at least three program committee members for publication in this journal. The paper by Giuseppe Di Lucca and Anna Rita Fasolino surveys the current state-of-research on testing web-based applications and discusses the future trend. It sets a good background for the rest of the papers that reports original research results on the topic and helps the readers understand the challenges. One of the most common architecture of web-based applications is the so-called client–server architecture, where the server side contains scripts that handle HTTP requests, interact with other components of the software system, and generate dynamic contents. In the paper titled Data Flow Analysis and Testing JSP-Based Web Applications, Chien-Hung Liu