Examining Web Application by Clumping and Orienting User Session Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a user session clustering and augmentation method for web testing that reduces test suite size while effectively detecting faults by covering dependency relationships between web pages.

Contribution

It presents a novel session clustering and augmentation technique that improves fault detection efficiency in web application testing.

Findings

Significantly reduces the size of test suites.

Effectively detects majority of known faults.

Scales well with increasing user session data.

Abstract

The increasing demand for reliable Web applications gives a central role to Web testing. Most of the existing works are focused on the definition of novel testing techniques, specifically tailored to the Web. However, no attempt was carried out so far to understand the specific nature of Web faults. This paper presents a user session based testing technique that clusters user sessions based on the service profile and selects a set of representative user sessions from each cluster and tailored by augmentation with additional requests to cover the dependence relationships between web pages. The created suite not only can significantly reduce the size of the collected user sessions, also viable to exercise fault sensitive paths. The results demonstrate that our approach consistently detected the majority of known faults using a relatively small number of test cases and will be a powerful system when more and more user sessions are being clustered.