User-Session-Based Test Cases Optimization Method Based on Agglutinate Hierarchy Clustering

Web application testing based on user session reduces artificial efforts while designing and generating test cases. It attracts more and more researchers and forms a hot spot of web application testing. Reduction, prioritization, and selection of test cases are widely used for the testing based on user session. In this paper, web application test cases optimization based on clustering is researched, and a novel method named USCHC (User Sessions Clustering based on Hierarchical Clustering algorithm for test cases optimization) is proposed. This method firstly gives the function to calculate the distance between the user sessions, and then employs the bottom-up agglutinate hierarchical clustering algorithm to cluster the initial testing cases and produces different kinds of test suites. From the clustered test suites, representative test cases are selected to replace the original test cases in each kind of test suites to test the functionality of web applications. The experiments show that the number of test cases is reduced through USCHC while the testing efficiency is improved.