Web Testing for Reliability Improvement

In this chapter, we characterize problems for web applications, examine existing testing techniques that are potentially applicable to the web environment, and introduce a strategy for web testing aimed at improving web software reliability by reducing web problems closely identified with web source contents and navigations. Using information about web accesses and related failures extracted from existing web server logs, we build testing models that focus on the high-usage, high-leverage subsets of web pages for effective problem detection and reliability improvement. Related data are also used to evaluate web site operational reliability in providing the requested pages as well as the potential for reliability growth under effective testing. Case studies applying this approach to the web sites www.seas.smu.edu and www.kde.org are included to demonstrate its viability and effectiveness. We also outline extensions to our approach to address testing, defect analysis, and reliability improvement issues for the constantly evolving web as a whole by analyzing the dynamic web contents and other information sources not covered in our current case studies.