An Empirical Investigation on the State of the Art and Practice of Load Testing In Web Applications

Abstract: Background: Software testing refers to various activities from unit testing toacceptance testing. Different test cases are generated for testing different parts of ansystem or an application, these test cases replicate actual user behavior. Load testingis used to check performance and usability attributes of the application under theload. Web application is an application that will be executed on a web browser likechrome, safari, and opera etc. Load testing is essential for web applications, whereloads are used to mimic actual user’s behavior. There can be several challenges toperform load testing on web applications to ensure the quality a product before it’srelease into the market.Objectives: This thesis aims to provide an in-depth understanding of load testing in web applications by investigating the state of the art and state of the practiceand challenges related to load testing. The main objectives of this research are toaggregate the research on state of the art in load testing in web applications, toidentify the state of the practices and existing problems related to load testing inweb applications, to identify the solutions to the problems that are faced while implementing load testing in web applications.Research Method: A systematic mapping study has been conducted to investigate state of the art and challenges while performing load testing. From thechallenges obtained from the systematic mapping study, a survey had been conducted to investigate state of the practices for the challenges while performing loadtesting and also derive measures or strategies to overcome the challenges.Results & Conclusion: From analysing the data from systematic mappingstudy we had considered 21 research articles to conduct this study. From those21 articles a total of 8 challenges had been derived. Among the 8 challenges Resource utilization and performance metrics are most refereed among the 21 articles.few more challenges and recommended measures for the obtained challenges are reported from the survey study. This research assisted us in identifying some of themost prevalent issues faced by practitioners, as well as the appropriate counter measures to take while performing load testing on web applications. This study canbe further more extended by conducting a multi use case in different companies todeepen the understanding about the challenges