SHF: Small: Detecting and Repairing Presentation Failures in Web Applications

SHF：小型：检测和修复 Web 应用程序中的演示失败

• 批准号: 1528163
• 负责人: William Halfond
• 金额: $ 37.5万
• 依托单位: University of Southern California
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-08-01 至 2020-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1528163&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; Detecting; Repairing; Presentation

The user interfaces (UIs) of a web application serve an important rolein the success of online companies. Studies have shown that theaesthetics of an application?s UIs can strongly influence users?overall evaluation of a company; in particular impressions oftrustworthiness and usability. Presentation failures ? a discrepancybetween the actual appearance of a web site and its intendedappearance ? can undermine this effort and negatively impact endusers? perception of the quality of the site, the services itdelivers, and affect the branding a company is trying to achieve.Debugging presentation failures is typically a manual task wheretesters must identify when the layout and style of an app?s pages isincorrect and developers must carry out repairs. This process is bothlabor intensive and error prone: testers can easily miss presentationfailures, since the process is based on the testers? visual comparisonof a page and an oracle; and it can be difficult for developers toidentify the responsible HTML elements or properties once a failure isdetected, since HTML and CSS interact in complex ways. In thisresearch effort the PIs will investigate automated techniques to helptesters more accurately detect presentation failures and efficientlyidentify the faulty code. Given the widespread deployment of webapplications, this work will impact both end users and softwaredevelopers by reducing errors in these applications and making thedebugging process more effective and efficient. The results of thisresearch will also impact educational efforts through the training offuture software engineering in new techniques to improve the qualityof web applications.The technical research will encompass two general areas. The firstarea of research will advance techniques for detecting presentationfailures. The primary mechanism for doing this will be to applycomputer vision techniques to automatically identify discrepanciesbetween the actual rendered appearance of a UI and its intendedappearance. The developed techniques will be widely applicable to arange of UIs, including those with dynamic content and those usingdifferent specification mechanisms for UI oracles. The second area ofresearch will use the identified differences to identify the specificelements in the UI code that are responsible for the observedfailures. The research efforts will focus on using artificialintelligence techniques, such as search-based and statistical-basedlearning, on the UI?s layout models to reason about the UI?s possiblefaults and guide the developers to identify the faulty HTML elementsand CSS properties.

Web应用程序的用户界面（UI）在在线公司的成功中扮演着重要的角色。 研究表明，美学的应用程序？的UI可以强烈影响用户？对一个公司的总体评价;特别是对可靠性和可用性的印象。演示失败？a discrepancybetween之间the actual实际appearance外观of a web站点and its intendedappearance外观？会破坏这一努力并对最终用户产生负面影响吗？网站质量的感知，它提供的服务，并影响品牌的公司正在努力实现。演示失败通常是一个手动任务，测试人员必须确定何时布局和风格的应用程序？的页面不正确，开发人员必须进行修复。这个过程是劳动密集型的，而且容易出错：测试人员很容易错过演示失败，因为这个过程是基于测试人员的。一个页面和一个oracle的可视化比较;一旦检测到故障，开发人员很难识别负责的HTML元素或属性，因为HTML和CSS以复杂的方式交互。在这项研究工作中，PI将研究自动化技术，以帮助测试人员更准确地检测演示失败并有效地识别错误代码。 鉴于Web应用程序的广泛部署，这项工作将通过减少这些应用程序中的错误并使调试过程更加有效和高效来影响最终用户和软件开发人员。 这项研究的结果也将影响教育工作，通过培训未来的软件工程新技术，以提高web应用程序的质量。 研究的第一个领域是发展检测呈现失败的技术。 这样做的主要机制将是应用计算机视觉技术来自动识别UI的实际呈现外观与其预期外观之间的差异。 所开发的技术将广泛适用于各种UI，包括那些具有动态内容的UI和那些使用不同规范机制的UI预言机。 第二个研究领域将使用已识别的差异来识别UI代码中导致已识别故障的特定元素。 研究工作将集中在使用人工智能技术，如搜索为基础的学习，对用户界面？的布局模型来推理UI？并指导开发人员识别错误的HTML元素和CSS属性。