Hybrid Prioritization of User-Session Based Test Cases for Web Application Testing

Increased use of web-based applications by business, government and consumers to perform their daily operations has led to the need for reliable, well-tested web applications. A short time to market, large user community, demand for continuous availability, and frequent updates motivate cost-effective testing strategies. One promising approach to testing the functionality of web applications leverages user-session data collected by web servers. This approach, called user-session based testing, avoids the problem of generating artificial test cases by capturing real user interactions-rather than tester interactions-and utilizing the user sessions as representative of user behavior. On considering the various regression testing techniques like test case selection, test case reduction etc., there is a possibility for discarding test cases which may lead to incomplete testing. To overcome this disadvantage, we have chosen test case prioritization technique which prioritizes the various test cases based on different criteria. In our paper, we propose some test suite prioritization strategies for web application and examine whether these strategies can improve the rate of fault detection for web applications. Our experimental results show that the proposed prioritization techniques improve the rate of fault detection of the test suites when compared to other techniques.