Industrial Software Testing Research Articles

Test Better by Exploring: Harnessing Human Skills and Knowledge

Users continue to stumble upon software bugs, despite developers' efforts to build and test high-quality software. Although traditional testing and quality assurance techniques are extremely valuable, software testing should pay more attention to exploration. Exploration can directly apply knowledge and learning to the core of industrial software testing, revealing more relevant bugs earlier. This article describes exploration's characteristics, knowledge's role in software testing, and the three levels of exploratory-testing practices. Academics and practitioners should focus on exploiting exploration's strengths in software testing and on reporting existing practices and benefits in different academic and industrial contexts.

Multi-paradigm Models as Source for Automated Test Construction

The article discusses problems of model based test construction and ways of their solution using different kinds of models (operational, contract, axiomatic, and history-based specifications). The main idea is that the integration of model based techniques having different underlying formalisms can give valuable practical results in test construction. The idea is illustrated by successful applications of UniTesK test development technology based on the combination of contract specifications used to describe system behavior and operational models used for test sequence generation. UniTesK was designed in RedVerst [http://www.ispras.ru/groups/rv/rv.html] group of ISP RAS on the base of experience obtained in several industrial software testing projects.

Generating test data from state‐based specifications

AbstractAlthough the majority of software testing in industry is conducted at the system level, most formal research has focused on the unit level. As a result, most system‐level testing techniques are only described informally. This paper presents formal testing criteria for system level testing that are based on formal specifications of the software. Software testing can only be formalized and quantified when a solid basis for test generation can be defined. Formal specifications represent a significant opportunity for testing because they precisely describe what functions the software is supposed to provide in a form that can be automatically manipulated.This paper presents general criteria for generating test inputs from state‐based specifications. The criteria include techniques for generating tests at several levels of abstraction for specifications (transition predicates, transitions, pairs of transitions and sequences of transitions). These techniques provide coverage criteria that are based on the specifications and are made up of several parts, including test prefixes that contain inputs necessary to put the software into the appropriate state for the test values. The test generation process includes several steps for transforming specifications to tests. These criteria have been applied to a case study to compare their ability to detect seeded faults. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.