Analysis and Testing of Ajax-based Single-page Web Applications

Figure 4.5 Design of the Distributed Automated Testing Framework CHIRON
Unfortunately, distributed systems are inherently more difficult to design,
program, and test than sequential systems (Alager and Venkatsean, 1993).
They consist of a varying number of processes executing in parallel. A process
may also update its variables independently or in response to the actions
of another process. Testing distributed programs is a challenging task
of great significance. Controllability, observability (Chen et al., 2006), and reproducibility
problems might occur in distributed testing environments. In
this section we will present our distributed, automated testing framework
called Chiron and how it helps to decrease the magnitude of these problems.
We have released our testing framework under an open source license.
More information about Chiron can be obtained from the following URL:
http://spci.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/chiron/
4.5.1 The Chiron Distributed Testing Framework
As mentioned in Section 4.4.3, we defined several independent variables in
order to measure several dependent variables (see Section 4.4.4). The combination
of the independent variables (i.e. pull intervals, publish intervals, and
the number of users) is huge and that makes performing the tests manually
an error-prone, and time consuming task.
In addition, the tools and components we use are located in different machines
to simulate real-world environments. This distributed nature con-
86 4.5. Distributed Testing