  Software testing is a very expensive and time consuming process. It can
account for up to 50% of the total cost of the software development.
Distributed systems make software testing a daunting task. The research
described in this paper investigates a novel multi-agent framework for testing
3-tier distributed systems. This paper describes the framework architecture as
well as the communication mechanism among agents in the architecture. Web-based
application is examined as a case study to validate the proposed framework. The
framework is considered as a step forward to automate testing for distributed
systems in order to enhance their reliability within an acceptable range of
cost and time.
