Mining Workflow Models from Web Applications

Modern business applications predominantly rely on web technology, enabling software vendors to efficiently provide them as a service, removing some of the complexity of the traditional release and update process. While this facilitates shorter, more efficient and frequent release cycles, it requires continuous testing. Having insight into application behavior through explicit models can largely support development, testing and maintenance. Model-based testing allows efficient test creation based on a description of the states the application can be in and the transitions between these states. As specifying behavior models that are precise enough to be executable by a test automation tool is a hard task, an alternative is to extract them from running applications. However, mining such models is a challenge, in particular because one needs to know when two states are equivalent, as well as how to reach that state. We present ProCrawl (Process Crawler), a tool to mine behavior models from web applications that support multi-user workflows. ProCrawl incrementally learns a model by generating program runs and observing the application behavior through the user interface. In our evaluation on several real-world web applications, ProCrawl extracted models that concisely describe the implemented workflows and can be directly used for model-based testing.