DoDOM: Leveraging DOM Invariants for Web 2.0 Application Robustness Testing

Web 2.0 applications are increasing in popularity. However, they are also prone to errors because of their dynamic nature. This paper presents DoDOM, an automated system for testing the robustness of Web 2.0 applications based on their Document Object Models (DOMs). DoDOM repeatedly executes the application under a trace of recorded user actions and observes the client-side behavior of the application in terms of its DOM structure. Based on the observations, DoDOM extracts a set of invariants on the web application´s DOM structure. We show that invariants exist for real applications and can be learned within a reasonable number of executions. We further use fault-injection experiments to demonstrate the uses of the invariants in detecting errors in web applications. The invariants are found to provide high coverage in detecting errors that impact the DOM, with a low rate of false positives.