A survey on Test Suite Reduction frameworks and tools <s> Comparison of User Session Testing based TSR Tools <s> Agent-based computing represents an exciting new synthesis both for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, more generally, Computer Science. It has the potential to significantly improve the theory and the practice of modeling, designing, and implementing computer systems. Yet, to date, there has been little systematic analysis of what makes the agent-based approach such an appealing and powerful computational model. Moreover, even less effort has been devoted to discussing the inherent disadvantages that stem from adopting an agent-oriented view. Here both sets of issues are explored. The standpoint of this analysis is the role of agent-based software in solving complex, real-world problems. In particular, it will be argued that the development of robust and scalable software systems requires autonomous agents that can complete their objectives while situated in a dynamic and uncertain environment, that can engage in rich, high-level social interactions, and that can operate within flexible organisational structures. <s> BIB001 </s> A survey on Test Suite Reduction frameworks and tools <s> Comparison of User Session Testing based TSR Tools <s> The continuous use of the Web for daily operations by businesses, consumers, and the government has created a great demand for reliable Web applications. One promising approach to testing the functionality of Web applications leverages the user-session data collected by Web servers. User-session-based testing automatically generates test cases based on real user profiles. The key contribution of this paper is the application of concept analysis for clustering user sessions and a set of heuristics for test case selection. Existing incremental concept analysis algorithms are exploited to avoid collecting and maintaining large user-session data sets and to thus provide scalability. We have completely automated the process from user session collection and test suite reduction through test case replay. Our incremental test suite update algorithm, coupled with our experimental study, indicates that concept analysis provides a promising means for incrementally updating reduced test suites in response to newly captured user sessions with little loss in fault detection capability and program coverage. <s> BIB002
User session testing based TSR tools, including USbRed BIB002 and CPUT  , offers an effective and cheap mechanism for selecting representative user session data by capturing execution traces as created by real users. However, they need non-invasive capture tools to adequately capture the execution traces. On the other hand, they provide an external (or black-box) point of view, which is cost-effective in comparison to code coverage-based techniques and useful to expose functionality-related faults. Furthermore, proposed tools significantly decreased the testing cost in terms of finding the inputs as they generate a large pool of test cases without analyzing the implementation details. However, they achieved limited code coverage as specific input is required to exercise certain program paths. Ultimately, they never ensure exercising all program paths. USbRed BIB002 generates a large session data covering commonly used scenarios only, but incapable to explore the user session data in a systematic manner. Consequently, it lacks in covering rarest scenarios, which are useful in detecting critical faults. In contrast, CPUT  ensures t-way such as 2-way combinatorial coverage of inter-window interactions to select a rare pair, which is effective to determine different faults using common execution traces. Combinatorial explosion is one main issue that can negatively affect the performance of CPUT  . Clustering of similar user sessions may be a viable solution to avoid the combinatorial explosion. On the other hand, to capture HTTP request along with related data, CPUT  ) is supported by a generalized logger, which can be easily deployed on publicly available Apache server running on Linux or Windows platform. Conversely, USbRed BIB002 is supported by an uncommon Resin web server. Both USbRed BIB002 and CPUT  use a different format of test cases. USbRed BIB002 uses ordered HTTP requests as a test case. While, CPUT  uses XML format based test cases, which can be easily parsed and processed by open-source XML parser and replay tools, respectively. There are two main issues of USbRed BIB002 and CPUT  tools: (i) captured user session data becomes invalid due to small modification in web applications (e.g., change in page name, links, and options) and (ii) generated all user session data cannot be executed due to time constraints. Future tools should need to consider most recent user sessions to solve the test-suite size problem by finding minimal test inputs. Moreover, future tools can employ genetic algorithm  or software agent-based technology BIB001 , which has the high potential to provide efficient and effective solution for testing dynamic behavior of web applications.