Hai-Feng Guo

Ezana N. Beyenne, Hai-Feng Guo

The spreadsheet application is among the most widely used computing tools in modern society. It provides excellent usability and usefulness, and it easily enables a non-programmer to perform programming-like tasks in a visual tabular "pen and paper" approach. However, spreadsheets are mostly limited to bookkeeping-like applications due to their mono-directional data flow. This paper shows how the spreadsheet computing paradigm is extended to break this limitation for solving constraint satisfaction problems. We present an enhanced spreadsheet system where finite-domain constraint solving is well supported in a visual environment. Furthermore, a spreadsheet-specific constraint language is constructed for general users to specify constraints among data cells in a declarative and scalable way. The new spreadsheet system significantly simplifies the development of many constraint-based applications using a visual tabular interface. Examples are given to illustrate the usability and usefulness of the extended spreadsheet paradigm. KEYWORDS: Spreadsheet computing, Finite-domain constraint satisfaction, Constraint logic programming

Hai-Feng Guo, Qing Ouyang, Harvey Siy

We present TAO, a software testing tool performing automated test and oracle generation based on a semantic approach. TAO entangles grammar-based test generation with automated semantics evaluation using a denotational semantics framework. We show how TAO can be incorporated with the Selenium automation tool for automated web testing, and how TAO can be further extended to support automated delta debugging, where a failing web test script can be systematically reduced based on grammar-directed strategies. A real-life parking website is adopted throughout the paper to demonstrate the effectivity of our semantics-based web testing approach.