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To satisfy the rapid growth of cloud technologies, a large number of web applications have been developed and deployed, and these applications are being run in clouds. Due to the scalability provided by clouds, a single web application may be concurrently visited by several millions or billions of users. Thus, the testing and performance evaluations of these applications are increasingly important. User model based evaluations can significantly reduce the manual work required, and can enable us to determine the performance of applications under real runtime environments. Hence, it has become one of the most popular evaluation methods in both industry and academia. Significant efforts have focused on building different kinds of models using mining web access logs, such as Markov models and Customer Behavior Model Graph (CBMG). This paper proposes a new kind of model, named the User Representation Model Graph (URMG), which is built based on CBMG. It uses an algorithm to refine CBMG and optimizes the evaluations execution process. Based on this model, an automatic testing and evaluation system for web applications is designed, implemented, and deployed in our test cloud, which is able to execute all of the analysis and testing operations using only web access logs. In our system, the error rate caused by random access to applications in the execution phase is also reduced, and the results show that the error rate of the evaluation that depends on URMG is 50% less than that which depends on CBMG.


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URMG: Enhanced CBMG-Based Method for Automatically Testing Web Applications in the Cloud

Show Author's information Xiaolin XuHai Jin( )Song WuLixiang TangYihong Wang
Services Computing Technology and System Lab and Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China

Abstract

To satisfy the rapid growth of cloud technologies, a large number of web applications have been developed and deployed, and these applications are being run in clouds. Due to the scalability provided by clouds, a single web application may be concurrently visited by several millions or billions of users. Thus, the testing and performance evaluations of these applications are increasingly important. User model based evaluations can significantly reduce the manual work required, and can enable us to determine the performance of applications under real runtime environments. Hence, it has become one of the most popular evaluation methods in both industry and academia. Significant efforts have focused on building different kinds of models using mining web access logs, such as Markov models and Customer Behavior Model Graph (CBMG). This paper proposes a new kind of model, named the User Representation Model Graph (URMG), which is built based on CBMG. It uses an algorithm to refine CBMG and optimizes the evaluations execution process. Based on this model, an automatic testing and evaluation system for web applications is designed, implemented, and deployed in our test cloud, which is able to execute all of the analysis and testing operations using only web access logs. In our system, the error rate caused by random access to applications in the execution phase is also reduced, and the results show that the error rate of the evaluation that depends on URMG is 50% less than that which depends on CBMG.

Keywords: cloud, web application, performance evaluation, customer behavior, user representation

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Publication history

Received: 18 December 2013
Accepted: 27 December 2013
Published: 07 February 2014
Issue date: February 2014

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© The author(s) 2014

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61232008), the National High-Tech Research and Development (863) Program of China (Nos. 2013AA01A213 and 2013AA01A208), Chinese Universities Scientific Fund (No. 2013TS094), and Guangzhou Science and Technology Program (No. 2012Y2-00040).

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