Formal Structured Specification for Web Application Testing

The Z notation is one of the best known formal methods which is often declared as a formal specification language and which is gaining widespread acceptance as a useful means of specifying software systems. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the use of formal methods in the specification of web application testing. We propose an approach for rigorous and automatic testing of web applications using formal specifications. Our formal specification based approach is powerful, extensible, and versatile. It intends to address testing of various aspects of web applications, including functionality, security, and performance. We have developed a prototype tool based on the proposed approach, which accepts formal specifications in XML syntax as input, automatically generates test cases, executes the test cases and validates the test results.