Andrea Trentini

WebUml: reverse engineering of web applications

Web applications have become complex and crucial for many firms, especially when combined with areas such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and BPR (Business Process Reengineering). Since then the scientific community has focused attention to Web application design, development, analysis, testing, by studying and proposing methodologies and tools. This paper describes an automatic tool for the construction of UML models from existing Web applications. This tool, named WebUml, generates class and state diagrams by analysing source code and by interacting with the Web server. This reverse engineering tool is based on source code static analysis and also applies mutational techniques in order to exploit the server side execution engine to accomplish part of the dynamic analysis. This tool will be the core of a testing suite under construction at our laboratory. WebUml generated models (diagrams) will be used as a base for test case generation and coverage analysis.

TestUml: user-metrics driven web applications testing

Web applications have become very complex and crucial, especially when combined with areas such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and BPR (Business Process Reengineering), the scientific community has focused attention to Web application design, development, analysis, and testing, by studying and proposing methodologies and tools. This paper describes techniques for semi-automatic test case definition and for user1-driven testing (based on statistical testing or coverage analysis) from Web applications reverse engineered UML models. These techniques are implemented as tools in the WAAT project. WebUml is a reverse engineering tool that generates class and state diagrams through static and dynamic Web application analysis. TestUml is a testing suite that uses generated models to define test cases, coverage testing criteria and also reliability analysis.

A Java-based framework to support computer-assisted creation of structured XML documents

In the management of document-based information, the structure of the document itself is very important. In the XML world you can use a DTD (Document Type Definition) or XMLSchema to define that structure. But not everything can be described (and forced) through a DTD while XMLSchema is not yet widely supported. For our MENTOR project - a document-based university management system - we needed a tool to support the creation and storage of official-meeting transcripts. These documents are strongly structured, so strongly that in this case a simple DTD was not enough. We decided to build a custom tool to fulfill our need. In this article we show the different solutions we had to study to let users create XML documents with some considerations about the formalization level of each solution. Then we present and motivate our choice.

Evaluating Web applications testability by combining metrics and analogies

This paper introduces an approach to describe a Web application through an object-oriented model and to study application testability using a quality model focused on the use of object-oriented metrics and software analogies analysis. The proposed approach uses traditional Web and object-oriented metrics to describe structural properties of Web applications and to analyze them. These metrics are useful to measure some important software attributes, such as complexity, coupling, size, cohesion, reliability, defects density, and so on. Furthermore, the presented quality model uses these object-oriented metrics to describe applications in order to predict some software quality factors (such as test effort, reliability, error proneness, and so on) through an instance-based classification system. The approach uses a classification system to study software analogies and to define a set of information then used as the basis for applications quality factors prediction and evaluation. The presented approaches are applied into the WAAT (Web Applications Analysis and Testing) project

Weighing the impact of ICT on modular SMEs

We call ldquomodularrdquo firm a network of small interacting firms, exchanging artifacts (atoms) and information (bits) to accomplish a common goal. In this paper we propose a method to assess how effective is the information exchange among firm modular units. We propose to model a modular firm as a set of units that interact through well-defined channels: structural information together with type, format, and traffic shape are used to weigh the information exchange and the value associated to a given organizational setting.

A software architecture for distributed organization management

In large organizations, management of large amounts of knowledge is a common problem. This knowledge is usually available in a distributed environment, in structured or non-structured form, and often is not exactly known where it is located and how to retrieve it in flexible ways. This paper describes an architecture to manage typical activities for an organization such as our University. During system analysis and specification, we had to collect a lot of information about structure and content of our organization, information available in various formats and media and not always automatically collectable. Hence, we designed a Document-based Software Architecture to support systems where formalization of information repositories, standardization of information location and management of every aspect involved in distributed contexts are crucial needs. We discuss if the configuration of a central-knowledge centered organization is the right solution or if it is better the choice of a distributed one. Since, all the documents managed in any organization are usually available in a structured way, we foresee a strong usage of XML documents and metadata standard definitions.

Plan validation via petri nets in the real-time performers Java framework

The Real-Time Performers (RTP) architecture is a framework to design distributed soft real-time systems based on timed plans. Timed plans - they define system workflow - contain actions to be executed by distributed components at specified times. An RTP system is controlled by a strategist that may modify plans to adapt system behavior to environment conditions. When a timed plan is changed it may be checked for coherency. This paper presents techniques used in RTP to check timed plans validity through Petri Nets (PNs). These techniques are based on the definition of mappings from RTP topology and plans to PNs. Once PNs are generated, structural and behavioural properties can be calculated and mapped back to the RTP system.