10.4 Future Work
10.4.5 Extending the approach to server-side applications
Web applications are composed out of two distinct parts: the server- side, which is a usually a procedural application implementing data- access and business logic, and the client-side, an event-driven application implementing the UI. In this thesis, we have developed methods for automatic reuse on the client-side. However, since the client-side and server-side are parts of the same whole, in order to increase the usability of the developed methods, we plan to extend the approach to also include the server-side. In order to do this, we will have to make adjustments to the dependency graph, and extend the algorithms for automatic scenario generation, feature identification, and feature integration in a way that they also take into account the specifics of the server-side.
10.4.6
Extending the approach to other domains
Even though the processes described in this thesis were specifically de- veloped to address the domain of client-side web applications, some of the ideas could also be adapted to fit other, similar domains. For exam- ple, other UI domains, such as the domain of mobile applications, or the domain of standard desktop applications, have certain underlying prin- ciples that make them similar to the client-side web application domain. For this reason, we think that one viable aspect of future work could be the modifications of the developed procedures to other domains, or even the development of a general framework for automatic feature reuse.
132 Chapter 10. Conclusion
we consider all event types and all created event-chains as equally prob- able. One idea for possible improvement is to study both the event types and event chains that occur when users interact with the application, and then create heuristics that would increase the achieved code coverage.
We also plan to perform an empirical investigation to compare the scenarios generated by our method with the scenarios specified by appli- cation users and developers. This would help us to evaluate the quality of generated scenarios, and it would possibly provide further insights that could be used to improve our automatic scenario generation method.
10.4.3
Identifying Feature Code
The feature identification process, based on the feature manifestation points and the dependency graph, identifies the code of the target fea- ture. Similar techniques could also be used to identify code based on some other criteria, e.g. by substituting feature manifestation points with error manifestation points, a technique for identifying code that leads to an error could be developed. For this reason, we plan to investigate the application of the feature identification process to debugging.
Apart from debugging, the fact that we are able to identify code of all application features could be used to facilitate a number of software engineering activities, for example, feature understanding or software measurement (e.g. metrics that capture application complexity or main- tainability could be derived). We plan to study some of these possibili- ties.
During our experiments (Chapter 6) we have noticed that the test web applications contain more code than is actually needed by their be- havior. Since significant savings, in terms of code size and increased performance, can be made by removing unnecessary code, one of our plans is to make a wide, empirical study to investigate do web applica- tions, in general, include more code than actually needed.
10.4.4
Firecrow
The algorithms and processes used to implement automatic feature reuse are currently implemented by our tool – Firecrow (Chapter 8), which is a JavaScript library. While this offers benefits in terms of easy exten- sibility and the ability to mimic different browsers, it also suffers from performance problems. For this reason, as part of future work, we plan
10.4 Future Work 133
to implement the developed processes and algorithms directly into open- source browsers (e.g. Firefox, Chrome). This would enable us to perform extensive experiments on the most complex currently available applica- tions.
10.4.5
Extending the approach to server-side appli-
cations
Web applications are composed out of two distinct parts: the server- side, which is a usually a procedural application implementing data- access and business logic, and the client-side, an event-driven application implementing the UI. In this thesis, we have developed methods for automatic reuse on the client-side. However, since the client-side and server-side are parts of the same whole, in order to increase the usability of the developed methods, we plan to extend the approach to also include the server-side. In order to do this, we will have to make adjustments to the dependency graph, and extend the algorithms for automatic scenario generation, feature identification, and feature integration in a way that they also take into account the specifics of the server-side.
10.4.6
Extending the approach to other domains
Even though the processes described in this thesis were specifically de- veloped to address the domain of client-side web applications, some of the ideas could also be adapted to fit other, similar domains. For exam- ple, other UI domains, such as the domain of mobile applications, or the domain of standard desktop applications, have certain underlying prin- ciples that make them similar to the client-side web application domain. For this reason, we think that one viable aspect of future work could be the modifications of the developed procedures to other domains, or even the development of a general framework for automatic feature reuse.
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