Fujitsu develops software verification technology for practical-use web applications

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. and Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Inc. announced their joint development of the world's first core technology for automatic verification of Java-based practical-use web applications. It is used to automatically verify if a web application can operate properly to process specified task transactions - referred to as "business specifications", without the need for manually preparing detailed test procedures or test data.

This new technology has been developed based on verification technology called "model checking", that has been conventionally used for small-scale embedded software. It enables exhaustive and automatic testing that completely covers various scenarios and input data by users, for practical-use web applications such as purchase order systems, and can thereby contribute significantly to the development of high-quality systems.

As Internet technology is becoming more widespread, increasingly more companies are utilizing web applications to create internal mission-critical systems, such as purchase order systems or inventory management systems. Furthermore, in conjunction with the highly dynamic nature of businesses, enterprise systems are becoming larger and more complex, thus requiring more aggressive lead-times for development and testing. Given these circumstances, there is a need for technology capable of ensuring software quality to satisfy customer requirements.

In order to assure quality of web applications, testing is conducted to verify that the developed web application functions properly in accordance with its business specifications. Conventional testing necessitated significant manual effort, as a developer needed to review business specifications and determine which parameters to verify, then create test scenarios and test data in order to test those parameters, and then finally perform rigorous testing. It is generally known that even if such testing is conducted, 0.122 errors per 1,000 steps(1) will remain. This is attributable to the fact that it is highly difficult to avoid errors when depending solely on manual efforts, as it is extremely difficult to thoroughly cover all conceivable test scenarios.

In order to overcome these difficulties, building on formal verification that had been conventionally used for small-scale programs, Fujitsu Laboratories developed new technology that enables automatic and exhaustive testing of large practical-use Java-based web applications to verify their functionality with respect to the transaction specifications.

Fujitsu Laboratories
Fujitsu Laboratories of America