Enhancing the Efficiency of Regression Testing through Intelligent Agents

Abstract

Software testing is indispensable for all software development. As all mature engineering disciplines need to have systematic testing methodologies, software testing is a very important subject of software engineering. In software development practice, testing accounts for as much as 50% of total development efforts. Testing can be manual, automated, or a combination of both. Manual testing is the process of executing the application and manually interacting with the application, specifying inputs and observing outputs. Manually testing the software is inefficient and costly. It is imperative to reduce the cost and improve the effectiveness of software testing by automating the testing process, which contains many testing related activities using various techniques and methods. In order to automate the process, we have to have some ways to generate oracles from the specification, and generate test cases to test the target software against the oracles to decide their correctness. Today we still don't have a full-scale system that has achieved this goal. In general, significant amount of human intervention is still needed in testing. The degree of automation remains at the automated test script level. This paper therefore provides a timely summary and enhancement of agent theory in software testing ,which motivates recent efforts in adapting concepts and methodologies for agent oriented software testing to complex system which has not previously done. Agent technologies facilitate the automated software testing by virtue of their high level decomposition, independency and parallel activation. Usage of agent based regression testing reduces the complexity involved in prioritizing the test cases.With the ability of agents to act autonomously, monitoring code changes and generating test cases for the changed version of the code can be done dynamically. Agent-oriented software testing (AOST) is a nascent but active field of research . A comprehensive methodology that plays an essential role in software testing must be robust but easy-to use. Moreover, it should provide a roadmap to guide engineers in creating agent-based systems. The agent based regression testing (ABRT) proposed here is to offer a definition for encompassing to cover the regression testing phenomena based on agents, yet sufficiently tight that it can rule out complex systems that are clearly not agent based.