Thesis Abstract

In software engineering, performance testing is testing that is performed, to determine how fast some aspect of a system performs under a particular workload. It can also serve to validate and verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage. Performance testing is a subset of Performance engineering, an emerging computer science practice which strives to build performance into the design and architecture of a system, prior to the onset of actual coding effort

In recent years, Web applications have grown so quickly that they have already become crucial to the success of businesses. However, since they are built on Internet and open standard technologies, Web applications bring new challenges to researchers, such as dynamic behaviors, heterogeneous representations, novel control flow and data flow mechanisms, etc. In this paper, we propose an agent-based approach for Web application testing. While the agent-based framework greatly reduces the complexity of Web applications, a four-level dataflow test approach can be employed to perform structure testing on them. In this approach, data flow analysis is performed as function level testing, function cluster level testing, object level testing, and Web application level testing, from low abstract level to high abstract level. Each test agent in the framework takes charge of the testing in an abstract level for a particular type of Web document or object.

Thesis Overview