The case study was conducted to test Reach-U’s Workforce Management (WFM) application, a web-based mobile positioning application developed by Reach-U. WFM is an application that can observe a workforce’s movement history, location and send SMSs to personnel via the web browser client. WFM’s users are primarily companies that would like to track and plan their workforce locations in real time.

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Case study: Testing of Mobile
Positioning Web Services
by Dr. Andres Kull
The case study was conducted to test Reach-U’s (http://www. a full-feature TTCN-3 test development and execution platform
reach-u.com/) Workforce Management (WFM) application, a and the JMeter (JMet) load tester. Additionally, a system adapter
web-based mobile positioning application developed by Reach-U. was developed to communicate between WFM and the TTCN-3
WFM is an application that can observe a workforce’s movement test development and execution platform as well as the JMeter
history, location and send SMSs to personnel via the web browser load tester.
client. WFM’s users are primarily companies that would like to
Firstly, the TTCN-3 scripts generator was used to generate TTCN-3
track and plan their workforce locations in real time.
test cases from the system model.
The test cases generated from the
model were executed on the TTCN-
3 test development and execution
platform. Test cases controlled the
execution of JMeter as well. JMeter
was used to generate the load for
the server infrastructure of WFM.
The test cases instructed JMeter
to vary the load. Therefore, the test
cases were communicated to two
counterparts – the IUT and JMeter.
In between, the system adapter
was developed. The system adapt-
er connected to the TTCN-3 test de-
velopment and execution platform
to WFM and JMeter. The interface
of the system adapter towards
WFM provided HTTP message traf-
fic over TCP/IP. In this way the test
Figure 1: General architecture of WFM cases ran on the TTCN-3 execution platform and simulated the
WFM web-client. The interface of the system adapter to JMeter al-
The case study was performed to evaluate the applicability of
lowed JMeter to be controlled by HTTP GET messages over TCP/IP.
model-based testing for testing web services via functional and
load testing – use cases where an operator uses a WFM web-
client to locate targets were tested. Only servers that are part of
WFM were in the scope of the implementation under test (IUT).
A web client was simulated by the test system. It is worth noting
that testing the functionality of the web client itself was out of
the scope of the case study.
The following aspects were evaluated in the case study:
• Overall feasibility of model-based testing technology for
testing web services.
• Applicability of model-based testing technology for load
testing.
Implementation
In the case study we used a test generator producing TTCN-3
test scripts automatically from the State Model (UML) of the IUT,
Figure 2: The test environment of the WFM
76 The Magazine for Professional Testers www.testingexperience.com

3. Results
• Overall feasibility of model-based testing technology for testing web
services.
WFM is a complex distributed web application consisting of many server ap-
plications distributed/duplicated on different hosts and protected by a load
balancer from overload situations. The case study demonstrated the feasibil-
ity of the model-based testing (MBT) technology using TTCN-3 script’s auto-
matic generator for functional testing of an IUT interface over web services.
• Applicability of model-based testing technology for load testing
In the case study, the load tests and functional tests were used in parallel
to test the IUT. The case study demonstrated the applicability of the model-
based testing in general for usage in load tests to increase the quality of
overall testing. Moreover, it showed that MBT technology could be used
beyond the borders of traditional functional black-box testing. In the case Biography
study, the functional tests were generated out of the WFM model and used
in conjunction with a load tester in order to prove the expected behavior of Andres Kull is a co-founder and CEO of
the IUT in the event of heavy loads. Elvior OÜ. Elvior is a software testing
services and tools company specialized
in embedded and distributed software
testing. Andres has a PhD (2009) in
Informatics and Communication and
an MSc (1985) in Control Systems from
the Tallinn University of Technology. His
25-year professional career spans the
areas of control systems for the chemi-
cal industry and model-based enginee-
ring of software-intensive embedded
and distributed systems. Andres has
held researcher positions at the Tallinn
University of Technology and Technical
Research Centre of Finland (VTT). His
current specialities, in addition to the
management of Elvior, are embedded
software development and testing,
model-based testing, and TTCN-3 tes-
ting and test tools.
- the tool for test case design and test data generation
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www.testingexperience.com The Magazine for Professional Testers 77