A new approach in development of distributed framework for automated software testing using agents

Abstract

Software testing is the technical kernel of software quality engineering, and to develop critical and complex software systems not only requires a complete, consistent and unambiguous design, and implementation methods, but also a suitable testing environment that meets certain requirements, particularly, to face the complexity issues. Traditional methods, such as analyzing each requirement and developing test cases to verify correct implementation, are not effective in understanding the software’s overall complex behavior. In that respect, existing approaches to software testing are viewed as time-consuming and insufficient for the dynamism of the modern business environment. This dynamics requires new tools and techniques, which can be employed in tandem with innovative approaches to using and combining existing software engineering methods. This work advocates the use of a recently proposed software engineering paradigm, which is particularly suited to the construction of complex and distributed software-testing systems, which is known as Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. This methodology is a new one, which gives the basic approach to agent-based frameworks for testing.