Grant: Strategic Projects - Group
University of British Columbia
$161,000.00
Systemic software analysis and maintenance techniques for Web 2.0 applications
FY 2013-14
Summary
The World Wide Web has emerged as a medium for delivering interactive applications (called Web 2.0 applications) to end users. Compared to traditional desktop applications, Web 2.0 applications provide significant benefits in terms of portability, usability, and universal accessibility.However, such applications are challenging to develop, test, and maintain, and hence incur high engineering costs. This is because of their asynchronous, heterogenous, distributed nature as well as their dependability on loosely typed, dynamic programming languages such as JavaScript. This proposal aims to enable software developers to create more reliable, maintainable, and higher quality web applications. To that end, we will explore four synergistic, but parallel prongs in this research project. First, we will create systematic techniques to explore a web application and build a model of its behaviour. Second, we will develop automatic test generation and debugging techniques. Third, we will investigate new metrics and systematic techniques for analyzing web code quality. Finally, we will provide maintenance support in the form of code change monitoring and refactoring techniques geared towards web applications. This project will build on the unique expertise of the principal investigators in this area, and a recent CFI-funded infrastructure at UBC for web application analysis research. The benefits from this research to our Canadian-based partner organizations (viz. SAP, HootSuite, FusionPipe, Microsoft, and Fujitsu) are threefold. First, we will integrate the tools and techniques we develop into their software development cycles, thus helping them achieve more reliable and maintainable web applications. Second, we will train high quality students on cutting edge web technologies, who will be of immense value as interns or future employees. Finally, we will use web applications that are actively developed by the companies in our empirical evaluations, thus ensuring that the techniques and improvements resulting from our research can directly benefits our industrial partners.
Program
Strategic Projects - Group
Recipient
Location
British Columbia, Canada
Recipient Type
Academia
Type
Grant
Source
NSERC's Awards Data
As published
Application id
430240-2012
Name nom
Mesbah, Ali
Department département
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Organization id
2
Institution établissement
University of British Columbia
Province en
British Columbia
Province fr
Colombie-Britannique
Country en
CANADA
Country fr
CANADA
Fiscal year exercice financier
2013
Competition year année de concours
2012
Award amount
161000
Program id
STPGP
Program name en
Strategic Projects - Group
Program name fr
Projets stratégiques - De groupe
Group en
Research partnerships programs
Group fr
Programmes de partenariat
Committee code
1567
Committee name en
Strategic Projects Selection Panel - ICT
Committee name fr
Comité de sélection des projets stratégiques - ICT
Area of application code
801
Area of application group en
Information and communication services
Area of application group fr
Services d'information et de télécommunications
Area of application en
Computer software
Area of application fr
Logiciel
Research subject code
2706
Research subject group en
Information technology
Research subject group fr
Technologie de l'information
Research subject en
Software engineering
Research subject fr
Génie logiciel
Partie
2
Nb partie
3
Application title
Systemic software analysis and maintenance techniques for Web 2.0 applications
Keyword
NSERC
Application summary
The World Wide Web has emerged as a medium for delivering interactive applications (called Web 2.0 applications) to end users. Compared to traditional desktop applications, Web 2.0 applications provide significant benefits in terms of portability, usability, and universal accessibility.However, such applications are challenging to develop, test, and maintain, and hence incur high engineering costs. This is because of their asynchronous, heterogenous, distributed nature as well as their dependability on loosely typed, dynamic programming languages such as JavaScript. This proposal aims to enable software developers to create more reliable, maintainable, and higher quality web applications. To that end, we will explore four synergistic, but parallel prongs in this research project. First, we will create systematic techniques to explore a web application and build a model of its behaviour. Second, we will develop automatic test generation and debugging techniques. Third, we will investigate new metrics and systematic techniques for analyzing web code quality. Finally, we will provide maintenance support in the form of code change monitoring and refactoring techniques geared towards web applications. This project will build on the unique expertise of the principal investigators in this area, and a recent CFI-funded infrastructure at UBC for web application analysis research. The benefits from this research to our Canadian-based partner organizations (viz. SAP, HootSuite, FusionPipe, Microsoft, and Fujitsu) are threefold. First, we will integrate the tools and techniques we develop into their software development cycles, thus helping them achieve more reliable and maintainable web applications. Second, we will train high quality students on cutting edge web technologies, who will be of immense value as interns or future employees. Finally, we will use web applications that are actively developed by the companies in our empirical evaluations, thus ensuring that the techniques and improvements resulting from our research can directly benefits our industrial partners.
