Web Test Integration and Performance Evaluation of E-Commerce Web Sites

Web Test Integration and Performance Evaluation of E-Commerce Web Sites Md. Safaet Hossain Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science North South University, Dhaka Bangladesh Email: safayet@eecs.northsouth.edu Md. Shazzad Hosain Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science North South University, Dhaka Bangladesh Email: shazzad@northsouth.edu Abstract Web applications are becoming progressively more complex and imperative for companies. The e-commerce web sites have been serving to accelerate and disseminate more widely changes that are already under way in the economy. Their development, including analysis, design and testing, needs to be approached by means of support tools, while their correctness and reliability are often crucial to the success of businesses and organizations. There are some tools provided to support analysis and design. However, few tools are provided to directly support the software testing on Web-based applications. In this paper, an automated online website evaluation tool hosted at http://safaethossain.comze.com is proposed to support the automated testing of web-based applications. Testers can evaluate performance of a site with other websites and can precisely express the existing websites and find out what are the modifications required. The tool elevates the automation level of functional testing for web applications into a new height. Keywords: Web based applicatoin testing, performance testing, functional testing, test methods integration, e-commerce. I. INTRODUCTION We need internet in almost every field of life. We use internet mostly in form of web applications. We use web applications for paying utility bills, social networking, email, online transactions etc. Online shopping has become progressively widespread over the years. E-commerce sales in U.S. grew from 72 billion U.S. dollars in 2002 to 228 billion U.S. dollars in 2010. The leading portions of online revenues were generated by the retail shopping websites, which earned 142 billion U.S. dollars in 2010. A 2011 e-commerce market projection predicted that online retail revenues alone would reach 269 billion U.S. dollars by 2015. Simultaneously, the number of online shoppers in the U.S. is expected to grow from 140 million in 2010 to 170 million in 2015 according to emarketer estimates [14]. In a study by Glenn A. Stout [13], Senior Functional Specialist, The Revere Group, demonstrates that poorly operating websites are stunning, and even affect the online business severely. The study also showed that when errors are found on an e-commerce website, 28% of the people stopped shopping at that site, 23% stopped buying from the site, and 6% of the people were so upset, that they stopped buying at e- commerce sites [13]. One can only surmise that the customers feel that if the company cannot provide a quality website, then they may not be able to sell a quality product from their stores. To make an online site popular, effective, and competitive to business, whether it is an e-commerce site or social networking site or any other site, there is no alternative of making a good quality site in terms of performance and reliability. Before launching any online sites, thus it is imperative to test the site for its high performance and reliability with World Wide Web consortium standard. At the same time, the site requires to be compared with other online sites to be competitive in the e-commerce market. There are many different techniques or Web test methods that we can apply for performance evaluation and for error free sites. Tools such as HTML validator, bobby, Netcraft allows static analysis of sites e.g. HTML errors, link errors etc. The following table demonstrates about the sites that provide tested result like page size, performance time etc. TABLE 1: LIST OF ONLINE WEB TESTING TOOLS TO EVALUATE SITES Web Site HTML Validator http://validator.w3.org/ Measurements This HTML Validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. In recent years, web applications have become important for many companies, as being a convenient and inexpensive way to provide information and services on-line. Since a malfunctioning web application could interrupt an entire business and cost millions of dollars, there is a strong demand for methodologies, models and tools that can improve the quality and reliability of web sites [1]. s Validator http://validator.w3.org/ checklink Functional Accessibility Evaluator http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/ Hera http://www.sidar.org/ hera/ The Checker analyzes anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links. Use this tool to evaluate the functional accessibility of your web site. HERA is a tool to check the accessibility of Web pages according to the specification Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0).

Any Web site that requires evaluating the above mentioned criteria would require accessing these Web applications separately, obtain test result for a specific functionality, merge and evaluate the result manually for proper decision. It increases the time as well as the cost of application testing. Testing of web-based applications in particular deserves further examination due to economic considerations and companies are choosing not to test due to resource constraints. However, if we could integrate different online Web test tools or applications, it would make the Web testing much faster and easier thus help building robust e-commerce sites. Application integration is not entirely a new idea. Recently this issue is of much interest, especially in Bioinformatics application domain, such as found in [17]. Thus our idea is to use existing Web testing applications and integrate these applications for faster and reliable Web testing. The idea is to develop a test tool, where users will put their Web site URL to test and the tool automatically crawls different existing test sites, submit queries for test purpose, gather test result and display the result to user in an integrated view. Thus in this research our main contributions are: 1. Integrate different online Web test applications. 2. Evaluate performance of Web applications. 3. Compare different web sites performance to make an e-commerce business competitive. The paper is organized as the following. Section II provides related works, section III presents Web test models, section IV describes Web evaluation methodologies and finally section V draws the conclusion. There are different sites or Web applications to evaluate e- commerce sites that can check the web pages against the web standards [18]. HTML Validator (http://validator.w3.org/) checks HTML, XHTML or CSS documents, and returns a list of warnings & errors according to the standard. It also helps us to eliminate website problems that cause visitors to abandon websites. The s Validator (http://validator.w3.org /checklink) reads an HTML or XHTML document or a CSS style sheet and extracts a list of anchors and links so that no anchor is defined twice. It then checks the status of every page links. The W3C checker accepts URL address of Web page and parses each and every hyperlink to find broken links in the page. The Functional Accessibility Evaluator (http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/) analyzes web pages for markup that is consistent with the W3C standard. It analyzes the web pages based on navigation & orientation, text equivalents, scripting, styling etc. The Hera is a tool to check the accessibility of Web pages according to the specification of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [18]. HERA (http://www.sidar.org/ hera/) performs a preliminary set of tests on the page and identifies any automatically detectable errors or checkpoints met, and which checkpoints need further manual verification. The Web Page Size Checker tool gives us the page size of the specified URL. Page size determines how long it will take usually for users to open the web page. For example: 10 kb is approximately a small page size, which means the loading speed is also quicker. In this paper we also demonstrate an additional feature included into the integrated web test model. By traversing all the web page link of an e-commerce web site it will provide response time and page size of all links along with the URL (uniform resource locator). II. RELATED WORKS Good quality Web application is one of the important criteria for successful e-commerce sites. Investigation by Forrester Research [6] found that consumers expect pages to load in two seconds or less, and after three seconds, up to 40 percent users will abandon the site. In another research [16] authors also pointed out that users feel uninterrupted page response time if it is less than 1.0 second, even though the user will notice the delay. However there are still no industry standards for acceptable application response time. According to Gomez benchmarking [15], the comparison between different websites can be made by evaluating the average response time of all the pages of a Web site. III. WEB TEST MODELS The present web test model in simple terms is checking the web application from specified URL to check potential bugs before it s made live or before code is moved into the production environment. During this stage users need to visit several sites, put URL into these sites and gather reports from all the sites for test result. It increases the time and cost of web testing. The model is shown in figure 1. The user view of quality e-commerce site can be assessed mainly in terms of functionality and usability. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [18] defines a set of guidelines for quality Web designing and testing. These guidelines cover a wide range of development standards including HTML tags, CSS, web accessibility, HTTP/1.1: Status Code Definitions etc. Every guideline provides a technique for accessing the content of Website. The qualitative measures [19], [20] such as text formatting, link formatting, page formatting, graphics element, page performance and site architecture are used to achieve quality of website. Figure 1: Present Web test model In contrast to the present web test model, the integrated web test model that we are proposing in this paper as shown in figure 2, integrates existing test sites into a single platform. In this approach, user puts the web URL under test into the integrated

Web test tool, the test tool then automatically crawls other existing Web test tools, submits URL for test purpose, gathers results from different sites and merges the results so that user can view all the testing results at a glance. The integrated model also provides some new web testing features such as link status checking, page response time for every link, page size checker of the specified URL in bytes and kilo bytes. These additional results relieve the user to measure the response time of all the links of the e-commerce site and thus get an average response time and average page size. Based on these above criteria we evaluated four Bangladeshi e-commerce sites www.hutbazar.com, www.bazarsodai.com, www.clickbd.com, and www.cellbazaar.com as elaborated below: Evaluation of Good and Bad s of a Web Site Broken hyperlinks on websites are not just annoying their existence may cause some real damage to ecommerce online business as well as to the reputation in the online business. Search engines might stop crawling the e-commerce site if broken links found. Our developed integrated tool traverses all the hyperlinks and finds out page statuses that are shown in table 2. The corresponding graphs are shown in figure 3 and 4. TABLE 2: PAGE LINK PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF DIFFERENT WEB SITES Figure 2: Integrated Web test model Website Bad Good Total Bad % Good % Hutbazar 1 55 56 1.79 98.21 Bazarsodai 5 101 106 4.72 95.28 ClickBD 0 121 121 0.00 100.00 Cellbazaar 331 14 345 95.94 4.06 In the integrated web testing view we will get errors and warnings about HTML code, page links reports, page link status code definitions, total number of good link and bad link, list of all URL links and a table mentioning link number with page access date & time, web page link response time, web page size for every webpage link into the e-commerce sites. Getting all these information would require accessing at least five different Web test sites. IV. WEB EVALUATION METHODOLOGIES Like any complex piece of software there is no single, all inclusive performance indicator that fully characterizes a Web site. Different fault types define different problems. For example, HTML head tag errors, font tag errors and body tag errors identify the problems in the text elements of web page. Thus text formatting measures are to be evaluated. The image tag error and image load errors identify the errors in display link tag errors. The script tag errors, server connectivity errors, down load time of Website and broken link errors contribute the need of Website architecture redesign. However in this research the following fault types are investigated: Web page faults: This includes web page faults according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and World Wide Web consortium. HTML faults: This includes HTML tag opening and closing error. Error: This includes page link error. Page status: This includes page link status according to the benchmark. Response time testing: This includes response time of each page link. Figure 3: Number of good vs. bad links of four sites Figure 4: Percentage of good and bad links of four sites

Web Page Response Time sites can provide a useful service for communities and The end-to-end time elapsed to response a web page link, or in identifies areas in which additional automated performance other words, time elapsed from client s HTTP request to analysis is needed. However use of number of different render response page in client s browser. We have traversed techniques or web test methods has shown that there are all the page links of a Web site and collected page size (KB) inconsistencies in the way they operate, which can result and response time (second) to evaluate the site. It was inconsistencies and difficulties in producing results. Our future observed that response time increases as the page size line of work would be to test different benchmark [18] suites increases, which are obvious. Result of one such site for different kinds of tools. We can further extend this work to www.hutbazar.com is shown in figure 5. identify other components of web site design for quality assessment which would further enable to improve the design as a part of the end user experience which emphasizes the continuous improvement of the design aspect and promote a culture of performance excellence of web design. Figure 5: HutBazar.com Website Evaluation with all page links Website performance (avg. response time vs. avg. page size) Web page link response time does not give much information about a Web site, but knowing average page response time gives insight of performance of an e-commerce site. However, if we like to compare different Web sites performance, then average response time vs. average page size provides information about the quality of e-commerce sites. For example, if an e-commerce site has smaller average page size and thus less response time than other similar e-commerce sites then the site is good and vice versa. Thus we calculated average response time and average page size of the four e- commerce sites as shown in table 3. Some points that are not addressed, but are certainly beyond the scope of this paper are the new breed of Web Application that utilizes Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and with the page centric view, and page that change their structure depending on the input. Next step is investigating more changeable issues in the new breed of web applications to improve the proposed test path generation approach and developing a prototype tool to execute the web testing model. TABLE 3: PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF DIFFERENT WEB SITES Figure 6: Average Page Response time Ecommerce Site Response Time Page Size (Average) (Average) Hutbazar 2.56 seconds 1.85 KB Bazarsodai 5.34 seconds 4.64 KB CellBazar 6.40 seconds 6.39 KB ClickBD 2.84 seconds 2.84 KB Figure 6 shows average page response time and figure 7 shows average page size. According to these graphs it is evident that hutbazzar.com is the best among these four sites. V. FUTURE WORKS This paper describes that automated web test integration according to the benchmarking [15] [16] of e-commerce web Figure 7: Average Page Size

VI. CONCLUSIONS This paper investigated various measures required for quality Website design. A focused approach was made to identify page link error, page size and page response time in developing and testing e-commerce websites. This would enable to adjudge the quality status of Web design of the various sites and would indicate the necessity of improvement in the design of the Website. The integrated web testing tool evaluated effective testing methodology for web application and improved the performance testing of web application. Using a series of online diagnostic tools, we examined many dimensions of quality, and each dimension was measured by specific test online. To get results on the quality of a Web site, we measured sample data extracted from different web sites and calculate response time, page size, number of item, and load test, tag validation, and broken link, number of link test. Moreover because the ultimate determinant of quality website is the users, future directions for this research also involve the objective and subjective views of the website from user s perspective. Finally, the practical experiment of applications of our methodology has been described. We believe that this experiment provides encouraging results concerning the validity, correction and agility of the method. TOOL AVAILABILITY The tool has been released online for public use. More information about the tool can be found at the following location: http://safaethossain.comze.com REFERENCES [1] C. Kallepalli, J. Tian, Measuring and Modeling Usage and Reliability for Statistical Web Testing, IEEE Trans Software Engineering, 2001,27(11), pp. 1023-1036. [2] L. Xu, B. W. Xu, and Z.Q. Chen, Survey of Web Testing, Computer Science (in Chinese), 2003, 30(3), pp. 100-104. [3] Xu L, Xu BW, Chen HW. 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Retrieved June 15, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://www.evolutif.co.uk/articles/ EBTestingPart1.pdf [14] http://www.statista.com/topics/871/online-shopping/, last accessed on June 22, 2012 [15] 10 Best practices for benchmarkibg web and mobile site performance, white paper: web performance management, Compuware Corporation World Headquarters, Detroit, MI 48226-5099 2011 Compuware Corporation [16] Mario Milicevic, Krunoslav Zubrinic and Ivona Zakarija Dynamic Approach to the Construction of Progress Indicator for a Long Running SQL Queries, International Journal of Computers Issue 4, Volume 2, 2008, pp. 489-496 [17] Turker C, Akal F, Schlapbach R, Life sciences data and application integration with B-fabric Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics, Volume 8, Issue 2, July 2011. [18] Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by W3C, http://w3.org. [19] G. Sreedhar and A.A. Chari, An experimental Study to Identify Qualitative Measures for Website Design, Global Journal of Computer Science and Technology, University ofwisconsin, USA, September, 2009. [20] G. Sreedhar, A.A. Chari and V. V. Venkata Ramana, Evaluating Qualitative Measures foreffective Website Design, International Journal on Computer Science and Engineering,vol.02, No.01S, 2010, pp.61-68. [21] Ali Azad, Elements of Effective Web Page Design, Global Competitiveness, January, 2001. [22] L. Page, S. Brin, R. Motwani and T. Winograd, The Page Rank Citation Ranking: Bring Order to the Web, Technical Report, Stanford University, 1998. [23] E. Glover, K. Tsioutisiouliklis, S. Lawrence, D. Pennock, G. Flake, Using Web Structure for Classifying and Describing Web Pages, in Proceedings of WWW2002, Hawaii, May2002. AUTHORS PROFILE Md. Safaet Hossain is a Master s student in the Department Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, North South University, Bangladesh. Currently he is doing thesis in the area of Software Engineering. His interests are in software engineering, Web engineering, software quality assurances, Web security related problems. Dr. Shazzad Hosain is an Assistant Professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at North South University (NSU), Bangladesh. His interests are in software testing, Web data integration, Semantic Web, knowledge representation, business and scientific workflow systems, Web security, and bioinformatics related problems. He is also interested in developing microcontroller based systems that interface different devices as well as small/heavy industries, Scientific Computing, SCILAB, etc.