Proceedings of the third international workshop on Large scale testing

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Third International Workshop on Large-Scale Testing (LT 2014), held in Dublin on March 22nd, 2014. Modern software systems ranging from e-commerce websites to telecommunication infrastructures must service millions of users. Many field problems of these systems are due to their inability to scale to field workloads, rather than feature bugs. In addition to conventional functional testing, these systems must be tested with large volumes of concurrent requests (called the load) to ensure the quality of these systems. The theme of this year's workshop is Large-Scale Testing, which includes all different objectives and strategies of testing large-scale software systems using load. Examples of large-scale testing include live upgrade testing, load testing, high availability testing, operational profile testing, performance testing, reliability testing, stability testing and stress testing. Large-scale testing is a difficult task requiring a great understanding of the system under test. Practitioners face many challenges such as tooling (choosing/implementing the testing tools), environments (software, hardware setup) and time (limited time to design, test, and analyze). Yet, little research is done in the software engineering research. Large-scale testing is gaining more importance, as an increasing number of services are being offered in the cloud to millions or even billions of users. This workshop brings together software testing researchers, practitioners and tool developers to discuss the challenges and opportunities of conducting research on large-scale software testing. Our ultimate goal is to grow an active community around this important and practical research topic.