Title:

Applying Concept Analysis to User-session-based Testing of Web Applications

Authors:

Sreedevi Sampath, Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Lori Pollock, and Amie Souter Greenwald

Description:

Copyright 2007 IEEE. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the University of Delaware's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.

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.

Publisher:

IEEE

Journal:

Transactions on Software Engineering

Volume:

33

Issue Number:

10

Pages:

643--658

Date:

October 2007

Project:

Web Application Testing

Document Type:

Article

Key Words:

web applications, testing, test suite reduction, empirical study, user-session-based testing, concept analysis

Files:

[article: Adobe PDF] (3057 KB)
[IEEE Copyright: Text] (0 KB)

Bibtex Entry:

@article{123456789/183,
author = {Sreedevi Sampath and Sara Sprenkle and Emily Gibson and Lori Pollock and Amie Souter Greenwald},
title = {Applying Concept Analysis to User-session-based Testing of Web Applications},
journal = {Transactions on Software Engineering},
volume = {33},
number = {10},
pages = {643--658},
month = {October},
year = {2007}
}