An Empirical Comparison of Test Suite Reduction Techniques for User-session-based Testing of Web Applications

Author : Sprenkle, Sara; Sampath, Sreedevi; Gibson, Emily; Pollock, Lori; Souter, Amie
Date : Oct 2004
Document Type : Presentation

Abstract :

Automated cost-effective test strategies are required to provide reliable, secure, and usable web applications to consumers, government agencies, and businesses who rely on web applications to perform daily tasks. User-session-based testing is an automated approach to enhancing an initial test suite with real user data, enabling additional testing during maintenance as well as adding test data that represents real usage as operational profiles evolve. Test suite reduction techniques are critical to the cost effectiveness of user-session-based testing because a key issue is the cost of collecting, analyzing, and replaying the large number of test cases generated from user session data. We designed and performed an empirical study comparing the test suite size, program coverage, and fault detection effectiveness of three different requirements-based reduction techniques and three variations of concept analysis reduction applied to two web applications. Our poster describes our experiments and presents the results for one application.

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