Assessing, generating, and prioritizing tests for asynchronous JavaScript programs

评估、生成异步 JavaScript 程序的测试并确定其优先级

• 批准号: RGPIN-2021-03688
• 负责人: AlimadadiJani, Saba
• 金额: $ 1.75万
• 依托单位: Simon Fraser University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2021-01-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=741853
• 关键词: Assessing; generating; prioritizing; tests; asynchronous

The web has had a significant impact on many aspects of our lives and societies. Web applications have become integral parts of our education, entertainment, governments, businesses, and personal and social lives. Rigorous testing is required to ensure all these applications function as expected. However, testing web applications is a particularly challenging endeavour. JavaScript has been the lingua franca of client-side web development. More recently, platforms such as Node.js have made it possible to use JavaScript for writing code that runs outside of the browser on a light-weight, fast, and scalable platform. As such, server-side JavaScript development has also experienced an exponential growth in the past few years. JavaScript owes some of its popularity to the particular set of the language's paradigms, such as asynchronous execution. JavaScript is single-threaded and thus asynchronous callbacks are used regularly to simulate concurrency and provide capabilities such as rich user interactions, non-blocking I/O, and seamless client/server communications. Unfortunately, the analysis and testing techniques have not evolved nearly as much as our programming paradigms in web development have, and are thus not sufficient for detecting and revealing various bugs in asynchronous code. The goal of this research is to facilitate the process of testing asynchronous JavaScript programs in order to allow the development of robust web applications. To this end, we will provide novel techniques and tool support in development environments for JavaScript programmers and testers' everyday testing activities. Our proposed research will examine traditional testing techniques to better understand and address their shortcomings in the presence of new programming paradigms. We propose to revisit testing of asynchronous code, by introducing new paradigms for assessing the adequacy of existing testing techniques for asynchronous JavaScrip execution, generation of tests that address inadequacies of traditional testing for this evolved programming paradigm, and prioritization of the tests. The outcome of this research will have great impact in research and in industry, and will evolve our view of testing asynchronous code.

网络对我们生活和社会的许多方面产生了重大影响。 Web 应用程序已成为我们的教育、娱乐、政府、企业以及个人和社交生活中不可或缺的一部分。需要严格的测试来确保所有这些应用程序按预期运行。然而，测试 Web 应用程序是一项特别具有挑战性的工作。 JavaScript 一直是客户端 Web 开发的通用语言。最近，Node.js 等平台使得使用 JavaScript 编写在轻量级、快速且可扩展的平台上在浏览器外部运行的代码成为可能。因此，服务器端 JavaScript 开发在过去几年中也经历了指数级增长。 JavaScript 的流行在一定程度上归功于该语言的特定范式集，例如异步执行。 JavaScript 是单线程的，因此经常使用异步回调来模拟并发并提供丰富的用户交互、非阻塞 I/O 和无缝客户端/服务器通信等功能。不幸的是，分析和测试技术的发展还远远不如我们在 Web 开发中的编程范例，因此不足以检测和揭示异步代码中的各种错误。这项研究的目标是促进异步 JavaScript 程序的测试过程，以便开发健壮的 Web 应用程序。为此，我们将为JavaScript程序员和测试人员的日常测试活动提供开发环境中的新颖技术和工具支持。我们提出的研究将检查传统的测试技术，以更好地理解和解决它们在新编程范式中的缺点。我们建议重新审视异步代码的测试，引入新的范例来评估异步 JavaScrip 执行的现有测试技术的充分性，生成测试来解决这种演进的编程范例的传统测试的不足之处，以及测试的优先级。这项研究的结果将对研究和行业产生巨大影响，并将改变我们对测试异步代码的看法。