An Ontology for Guiding Performance Testing

Software test is a technique to obtain information about software systems quality. Performance test is a type of software test that aims at evaluating software performance at a given load scenario, but it requires specialized knowledge about tools, activities and metrics of the domain. Since ontology is a promising knowledge representation technique, this paper presents a literature review to identify trends and compare researches of ontologies in the fields of software testing and software performance. Also, to investigate this issue from a practical perspective, it was developed an ontology for representing the core knowledge of performance testing. This paper presents the ontology and compare it with related ones. Then, semantic technologies are explored to demonstrate the practical feasibility of developing ontology-based applications for assisting testers with performance test planning and management.