Improved automated tools for software testing

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Software applications, especially web-based applications, are typically constructed from a number of components; common components are web browsers, web application servers, data bases, and business logic entities.  Each of these components may use a different language to specify the functionality. An added element of complexity is that there may be several versions of system components; for example, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are two of the browsers in use, and for each of those browsers, there are typically several version numbers in use.With a diverse range of technology, ensuring that all these components can be integrated successfully into a working application is a challenge.This work aims to address two aspects of this challenge.  The first is to investigate ways that designers of component-based applications can focus on the functionality instead of the various languages used by the components.  That is, identify opportuntities for automated tools to assist in automatically generating parts of applications from models.The second is to improve the testing and testability of component based applications.  Testing components requires being able to control the component and observe its behaviour, but when combined into a complete system, some components may be difficult to access.  This work will develop methods and tools to improve access to the interfaces of web-based applications. It will also continue previous work on selecting test configurations for interaction testing, in order to achieve measurable coverage of combinations of component versions.