URMG: Enhanced CBMG-based method for automatically testing web applications in the cloud

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.