Paper Info
Title
Improving the testing efficiency of selenium-based load tests
Abstract
Web applications must be load tested to analyze their behavior under various load conditions. Typically, these load tests are automated using protocol-level HTTP requests (e.g., using JMeter). However, there are several disadvantages to using protocol-level requests for load tests. For example, protocol-level requests are only partially representative of the true usage of a web application, as the web application is not actually executed in a browser. It can be difficult to abstract complex behavior, such as a login sequence, into requests without executing the application. Browser-based load testing can be used as an alternative to protocol-level requests. Using a browser-based testing framework, such as Selenium, tests can be executed more realistically --- inside a browser. Unfortunately, because a browser instance must be started to conduct a test, browser-based testing has a high performance overhead which limits its applicability for load tests. In this paper, we propose an approach for reducing the performance overhead of running Selenium-based load tests. Our approach shares browser instances between test user instances, thereby reducing the performance overhead that is introduced by launching many browser instances during the execution of a test. Our experimental results show that our approach can significantly increase the number of user instances that can be tested on a test machine without overloading the load driver. Our approach and the experiences that we share in this paper can help software practitioners improve the efficiency of their own Selenium-based load tests.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/AST.2019.00008
Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Automation of Software Test
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
Test automation,Load testing,Selenium tests
Conference
978-1-7281-2238-0
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shahnaz M. Shariff100.34
Heng Li232533.39
Cor-Paul Bezemer328323.97
Ahmed E. Hassan45959287.68
Thanh H.D. Nguyen527011.84
Parminder Flora641619.50