Performance Testing Framework for REST-Based Web Applications

Recently, enterprises, organizations, and software companies are building more and more web applications to provide their services over the Internet. In order to fulfill various requirements, the complexity of web applications nowadays is increasing dramatically. As a result, the performance characteristics of web applications, including response time, throughput, etc, become more critical than before and should be taken into careful consideration. If the response time of a web application is poor, users may lose their interests even the function of the web application is correct. Therefore, how to execute performance testing on a complex web application systematically and efficiently will be an important issue. In this paper, a performance testing framework for REST-based web applications is introduced. The performance testing framework aims to provide software testers with an integrated process from test cases design, test scripts generation, to test execution. Based on the test cases designed by software testers and the appropriate software artifacts preserved by the framework (e.g., API document), the framework generates the corresponding performance test scripts, which can be executed by specific performance test tools. This helps software testers to focus more in the design of performance test cases. In addition, effort needed to understand the design and implementation of the application and to learn the operation of testing tools decrease. Thus, the efficiency of performance testing can be highly facilitated.