Abstract: Web applications are important parts of global information infrastructures.It attracts more and more researchers to study Web application performance testing.In this paper,a user-session-based approach combined with a modified agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm was proposed to automatically generate performance test cases.The approach generates test cases by exploiting user-sessions from server logs.It can not only reduce the manual effort when test engineers design the test cases,but also guarantee the validity of the testing results.In our approach,we firstly gave a definition of how to achieve the similarities between two URLs,and then employed a dynamic programming algorithm to calculate the similarities between two user sessions.According to the similarity matrix,a bottom-up agglomerative hierarchical clustering was employed to cluster the user sessions and then generated the test cases.Finally,experimental result of our approach shows its validity.

Key words: User session,Agglomerative hierarchical clustering,Performance testing,Validity