Automated identification of parameter mismatches in web applications

Abstract

Quality assurance techniques for web applications have be-come 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 exten-sively among themselves. Unlike traditional program mod-ules, 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 tra-ditional testing and verification techniques. To address this problem, we propose a static-analysis based approach for identifying parameter mismatches. We also present an em-pirical evaluation of the approach, which we performed on a set of real web applications. The results of the evalua-tion are promising; our approach discovered 133 parameter mismatches in the subject applications.