Leveraging Existing Test Cases to Analyze JavaScript Libraries

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Leveraging Existing Test Cases to Analyze JavaScript Libraries"

by

Mr. Wai Ting CHEUNG


Abstract:

JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages in 2017. Many 
JavaScript libraries such as Bootstrap, AngularJS, and jQuery are widely 
used in practice. However, existing research on JavaScript is not yet 
ready for analysis of libraries. Pattern-based static analyzers such as 
Lint identify known buggy patterns from the source code, but pattern 
matching can hardly identify bugs that require semantics-based analysis 
and has a large number of warnings and false positives. While 
semantics-based static analyzers can detect bugs that pattern-based static 
analyzers cannot, analyzing JavaScript libraries using existing 
semantics-based static analyzers for JavaScript faces several challenges: 
JavaScript functions not reachable during analysis, numerous combinations 
of inputs due to dynamic typing, and insufficient aids for debugging. 
Therefore, research on analyzing JavaScript libraries mostly focuses on 
the design of their techniques on popular libraries such as jQuery.

To address these limitations, this work proposes a combination of static 
and dynamic analysis techniques that leverages existing test cases to call 
the library functions so that they are reachable during static analysis. 
Also, our technique extends existing test cases and utilizes them to 
filter out false warnings and to reveal real errors that serve as 
debugging aids for developers. The proposed approach acts as a milestone 
that drives the JavaScript community to expand their scope of research by 
analyzing a large variety of JavaScript libraries in their work.


Date:			Friday, 28 April 2017

Time:                  	3:30pm - 5:30pm

Venue:                  Room 4475
                         (lifts 25/26)

Committee Members:	Dr. Sunghun Kim (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Xiaojuan Ma (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung
  			Prof. Frederick Lochovsky


**** ALL are Welcome ****