Publication at ICTSS 2017

A new publication has been accepted at the ICTSS 2017.

Richard Schumi, Priska Lang, Bernhard K. Aichernig, Willibald Krenn, and Rupert Schlick: “Checking Response-Time Properties of Web-Service Applications Under Stochastic User Profiles“, In Testing Software and Systems – 29th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, (ICTSS 2017), St. Petersburg, Russia, October 9-11, 2017, Proceedings, volume 10533 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 293-310. Springer, 2017. (PDF)(doi:10.1007/978-3-319-67549-7_18)

The paper was presented at the 29th IFIP International Conference on Testing, Software and Systems (ICTSS 2017) in St-Petersburg, Russia (9-11 October 2017).

Abstract:

Performance evaluation of critical software is important but also computationally expensive. It usually involves sophisticated load-testing tools and demands a large amount of computing resources. Analysing different user populations requires even more effort, becoming infeasible in most realistic cases. Therefore, we propose a model-based approach. We apply model-based test-case generation to generate log-data and learn the associated distributions of response times. These distributions are added to the behavioural models on which we perform statistical model checking (SMC) in order to assess the probabilities of the required response times. Then, we apply classical hypothesis testing to evaluate if an implementation of the behavioural model conforms to these timing requirements. This is the first model-based approach for performance evaluation combining automated test-case generation, cost learning and SMC for real applications. We realised this method with a property-based testing tool, extended with SMC functionality, and evaluate it on an industrial web-service application.