Web app performance testing in industrial contexts: Supporting workload generation with E2E-Loader++
Sergio Di Meglio, Luigi Libero Lucio Starace, Sergio Di Martino · Journal of Systems and Software · 2025
Performance testing is essential for ensuring that web applications remain responsive and reliable under varying workloads. Defining meaningful workloads remains a key challenge in performance testing, with existing solutions requiring deployed systems to collect real user behaviors, offering limited support for automated data dependency management, and lacking support for emerging protocols like WebSocket. Our previous work introduced E2E-Loader, a novel approach that supports the definition of performance testing workloads by exploiting existing End-to-End functional test cases, enabling workload creation even before system deployment. While initial results demonstrated technical feasibility, the practical utility and industrial readiness of automated workload generation remained unvalidated in real-world software engineering contexts. In this paper, we present E2E-Load-er++, an enhanced version of our original tool, with significant improvements to dependency detection capabilities, and provide the first rigorous industrial evaluation of our semi-automated performance testing workload generation approach. The comprehensive empirical assessment we conducted involved controlled experiments with professional software engineers working on proprietary industrial applications, aimed at measuring both technical effectiveness and practical impact of E2E-Loader++ on performance testing workflows. Results demonstrate substantial productivity gains: compared to manual approaches, E2E-Loader++ achieved a 62% reduction rate in workload creation time and a 37% reduction rate in the number of required user interactions per minute, while preserving comparable workload quality. Moreover, the tool received strong usability ratings and practitioner acceptance, confirming its potential for real-world adoption in industrial performance testing workflows.