Applying Concept Analysis to User-Session-Based Testing of Web Applications

Abstract

The continuous use of the web for daily operations by businesses, consumers, and the 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. User-session-based testing 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 and a set of heuristics for test case selection. Existing incremental concept analysis algorithms are exploited to avoid collecting and maintaining large user-session data sets and thus to provide scalability. We have completely automated the process from user session collection and test suite reduction through test case 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 little loss in fault detection capability and program coverage.

A survey on Test Suite Reduction frameworks and tools

“…Bertolino (Bertolino, 2007) has recommended 100% automated testing, which facilitates the tester to meet the challenges of a resource constrained testing environment. Motivated by this, researchers have proposed various frameworks that results various tools to provide automation facility during TSR process (Horgan and London, 1992, Xie et al, 2004, Xie et al, 2006, Andrews et al, 2006, Pacheco and Ernst, 2007, Jaygarl et al, 2010, Zhang et al, 2009, Dadeau et al, 2007, Kauffman and Kapfhammer, 2012, Sampath et al, 2007, Sampath et al, 2011, Woo et al, 2007, Chae et al, 2011, Hsu and Orso, 2009, Li et al, 2013, Zhang et al, 2010, Burger and Zeller, 2011. Consequently, automated TSR helps in accelerating the software delivery process compared to manual test filtering (Hsu and Orso, 2009).…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, researchers have proposed two TSR tools namely, USbRed (Sampath et al, 2007) and CPUT (Sampath et al, 2011), to support user session testing for web applications by determining and eliminating the duplicate user session data.  USbRed: Sampath et al (Sampath et al, 2007) proposed a framework supported by USbRed tool to incrementally reduce a set of recorded user session data.…”

“… USbRed: Sampath et al (Sampath et al, 2007) proposed a framework supported by USbRed tool to incrementally reduce a set of recorded user session data. It mainly focuses on maintaining coverage and fault detection capabilities in terms of all base requests and use case representation.…”

“…User session testing based TSR tools, including USbRed (Sampath et al, 2007) and CPUT (Sampath et al, 2011), offers an effective and cheap mechanism for selecting representative user session data by capturing execution traces as created by real users. However, they need non-invasive capture tools to adequately capture the execution traces.…”

“…Ultimately, they never ensure exercising all program paths. USbRed (Sampath et al, 2007) generates a large session data covering commonly used scenarios only, but incapable to explore the user session data in a systematic manner. Consequently, it lacks in covering rarest scenarios, which are useful in detecting critical faults.…”