A scalable approach to user-session based testing of web applications through concept analysis

Abstract

The continuous use of the web for daily operations by businesses, consumers, and government has created a great demand for reliable web applications. One promising approach to testing the functionality of web applications leverages user-session data collected by web servers. This approach automatically generates test cases based on real user profiles. The key contribution of this paper is the application of concept analysis for clustering user sessions for test suite reduction. Existing incremental concept analysis algorithms can be exploited to avoid collecting large usersession data sets and thus provide scalability. We have completely automated the process from user session collection and reduction through replay. Our incremental test suite update algorithm coupled with our experimental study indicate that concept analysis provides a promising means for incrementally updating reduced test suites in response to newly captured user sessions with some loss in fault detection capability and practically no coverage loss.

Addressing High Severity Faults in Web Application Testing

“…We followed the experimental setup in [31], taking a test case to be user session composed of URLs in a specific order, and its requirements to be the respective URLs each user session exercises. Because URLs frequently contain form data as name-value pairs, we follow Sprenkle et al [28,31] by examining the URLs independent of these values. For example, http://example.com/order.php?sku=12&id=11…”

Incremental Model-based Test Suite Reduction with Formal Concept Analysis

“…Sampath et al [13] have applied FCA for test suite reduction in the domain of web applications testing, in which, each of the URLs used in a web session is considered as a formal attribute; whilst each web session is considered as a formal object which constitutes to be a test case. The reduced test suite is obtained by selecting those test cases associated with the strongest concepts (i.e.…”

Automated replay and failure detection for web applications

“…We view the collection of logged user sessions as a set of use cases where a use case is a behaviorally related sequence of events performed by the user through a dialogue with the system [14]. The key insight of our approach is the formulation of the test case reduction problem for user-session testing in terms of concept analysis [26]. We can then exploit existing incremental concept analysis techniques to analyze the user sessions on the fly, as sessions are captured and converted into test cases, and thus we can continually reflect the set of use cases representing actual executed user behavior by a minimal test suite.…”

“…In [26], we presented an approach to achieve scalable usersession-based testing of web applications. We view the collection of logged user sessions as a set of use cases where a use case is a behaviorally related sequence of events performed by the user through a dialogue with the system [14].…”