Software Testing Tools Research Articles

웹 기반 로봇 소프트웨어 공학 도구 설계 및 구현

As the requirement of user for robot functionality, the function and interface for controlling the robot system is more sophisticated and complicated. Accordingly development process of robot is more complicated and it takes much longer time to develop a robot system. Software development using project management tool is more important in software engineering because of the complexity of software, especially robot system. This paper proposes SEED (Software Engineering Equipment for Development), which is a web-based and integrated software engineering tool to provide independent tools for robot software development. SEED includes the document management tool, the software configuration management tool, the software testing tool on developing robot software and provide a functionality of collaborated and remote development due to WEB-based operations.

Software development productivity and cycle time reduction

Increasing software developers' productivity and reducing the software development process' cycle time are key goals for organizations responsible for building software applications. This paper proposes four major areas impacting an organization's ability to increase developer productivity and reduce development cycle time. The four areas are (1) organizational structure and climate, (2) reward system, (3) software development process and (4) the use of software design and testing tools.

Predictable and Progressive Testing of Multithreaded Code

The Chess (Checker for System Software) testing tool repeatedly executes a multithreaded program while guaranteeing predictable and deterministic scheduling and progressively exploring more schedules to uncover errors quickly.

Designing test engine for computer-aided software testing tools

With the rapid development of software scale and programming languages, it is impossible to test software manually. The case for automating the software testing process has been made repeatedly and...

Finding Factors Impacting Productivity in Software Development Project Using Structured Equation Modelling

The size of international software industry is over $1000bn. Total revenue earned by the Indian software industry in year 2005 was $30bn and which is expected to grow. The price quoted by vendors to its customers and the rate of the customer service is dependent on the productivity of the project. Given the fact that software development complexity is on an ever-increasing curve, it becomes critical to tackle the issues that influence the productivity levels of the project teams involved. Identification of factors as either aiding or hindering productivity enables management to take steps to encourage the positive influences and to eliminate the negative ones. Hence it is important to understand the factors affecting productivity and how these factors affect productivity when they are present in tandem. Hence this report aims to develop a model using structured equation modelling to find important factors affecting productivity and their impact on productivity. This paper is a further improvement on the paper “Maximizing Productivity by Controlling Influencing Factors and Commercial Software Development”, by Mohapatra, S. The authors expect to come out with a ready model for productivity which can help any software development team in allocating resources to achieve maximum output. The Methodology used for this primary research is collection of data from project and delivery managers across three Indian IT majors and analysing that data employing SEM using a computer aided tool. Results showed that the best fit model consisting of important factors like experience of project team in technology and domain, training for the technology platform to be worked on and domain of work, client support and various other software testing tools availability helps in increasing productivity.

Research on software testing technique of airborne equipment based on airworthiness

According to the characteristics of the airborne embedded software, the airworthiness-based software testing technique and testing standard are systematically researched. The verification process of DO-178B standard is analyzed. The software integration testing process of airborne TCAS (Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System) is designed. The TCAS software testing project is finished in the hardware testing environment with the software testing tools. The improvement of the testing procedure defects are analyzed. Test result and the comparsion results are presented and analyzed. The correctness and the versatility of the testing model and the testing process are approved by the test examples.

REQUIREMENTS AND WISHED FEATURES FOR SOFTWARE TESTING TOOLS: A STUDY BASED ON THE USE OF SQFD

This paper presents a set of requirements related to software testing tools. These requirements were elicited during several meetings with software development professionals. We adopted the software quality function deployment (SQFD) in order to prioritize the identified requirements and technical issues, generating relevant information regarding the testing tools. This information can be used to compare and select testing tools. It can also be used by testing tool developers to direct their development effort towards aspects considered important by the users of this kind of tools, the testers.

Software testing optimization by advanced quantitative defect management

Software testing provides a means to reduce errors, cut maintenance and overall software costs. Numerous software development and testing methodologies, tools, and techniques have emerged over the last few decades promising to enhance software quality. While it can be argued that there has been some improvement it is apparent that many of the techniques and tools are isolated to a specific lifecycle phase or functional area. This paper presents a set of best practice models and techniques integrated in optimized and quantitatively managed software testing process (OptimalSQM), expanding testing throughout the SDLC. Further, we explained how can Quantitative Defect Management Model be enhanced to be practically useful for determining which activities need to be addressed to improve the degree of early and cost-effective software fault detection with assured confidence is proposed. To enable software designers to achieve a higher quality for their design, a better insight into quality predictions for their design choices, test plans improvement using Simulated Defect Removal Cost Savings model is offered in this paper.

Spatial analysis software testing tool based on object-oriented techniques

Object-oriented (OO) programming and system design have become the scalable methodology for large-scale enterprise and technology system designs. Spatial and geographic information system (GIS)-based systems are not exempt from this trend and have widely adopted object-oriented methodology. Testing strategies for systems developed with OO technologies need to be carefully evaluated. Specific features of OO technologies such as information hiding and close tying of data structures with class structures and the natural peculiarities of the spatial data require revisiting of test strategies for spatial applications built on OO technology. This article focuses on object-oriented testing trends and the development of associated tools in the GIS industry.

Search based software testing of object-oriented containers

Automatic software testing tools are still far from ideal for real world object-oriented (OO) software. The use of nature inspired search algorithms for this problem has been investigated recently. Testing complex data structures (e.g., containers) is very challenging since testing software with simple states is already hard. Because containers are used in almost every type of software, their reliability is of utmost importance. Hence, this paper focuses on the difficulties of testing container classes with nature inspired search algorithms. We will first describe how input data can be automatically generated for testing Java containers. Input space reductions and a novel testability transformation are presented to aid the search algorithms. Different search algorithms are then considered and studied in order to understand when and why a search algorithm is effective for a testing problem. In our experiments, these nature inspired search algorithms seem to give better results than the traditional techniques described in literature. Besides, the problem of minimising the length of the test sequences is also addressed. Finally, some open research questions are given.

JWalk: a tool for lazy, systematic testing of java classes by design introspection and user interaction

Popular software testing tools, such as JUnit, allow frequent retesting of modified code; yet the manually created test scripts are often seriously incomplete. A unit-testing tool called JWalk has therefore been developed to address the need for systematic unit testing within the context of agile methods. The tool operates directly on the compiled code for Java classes and uses a new lazy method for inducing the changing design of a class on the fly. This is achieved partly through introspection, using Java’s reflection capability, and partly through interaction with the user, constructing and saving test oracles on the fly. Predictive rules reduce the number of oracle values that must be confirmed by the tester. Without human intervention, JWalk performs bounded exhaustive exploration of the class’s method protocols and may be directed to explore the space of algebraic constructions, or the intended design state-space of the tested class. With some human interaction, JWalk performs up to the equivalent of fully automated state-based testing, from a specification that was acquired incrementally.

Getting it right [reliable computer software

This article deals verification of computer software and hardware, and the thing that's driving this is software and hardware are getting ever more complex. Nowadays companies are finding it very important to invest in new ways of designing the software and making sure that the software is right. The consequences of not getting the testing right are huge when the projects themselves are so complex. The key thing is that when we look at software or hardware, we think about it as a branch of logic, at an abstract level, rather than as a physical line of code or object. And we see if we can apply methods of logic to see if we've got the design right. The software testing tools that are being developed come in two flavours: one involves logical reasoning and building a formal proof about the software, while the other involves running logical tests on the software and checking models of the software - that is, logical model testing.

Evolutionary software engineering, a review

Abstract In this paper, we review the work applying computational evolutionary methods in software engineering, especially in software testing. Testing is both technically and economically vital for high quality software production. About half of the expenses in software production has been estimated to be due to testing. Much of the testing is done manually or using other labor-intensive methods. To develop efficient, cost effective, and automatic means and tools for software testing is thus highly tempting for software industry. Searching software errors by using evolution based methods like genetic algorithms is one attempt towards these goals. Software testing is a field, where the gap between the means and needs is exceptionally wide. Despite the great advances in computing during the last 30 years the software development and the testing process in most companies is still very immature, meanwhile the complexity and criticality of the software has increased tremendously. When testing software, by using any optimization method as a test data generator, we are optimizing the given input according to a selected software metric encoded as a fitness function. The success of genetic algorithms in optimization is based on the so called building block hypothesis. Basically, the genetic algorithms do not find any solitary bug at any higher probability than pure random search. However, evolutionary algorithms adapt to the given problem, in practice this means that a genetic algorithm-based tester generates several parameter combinations that reveal minor bugs and based on this information constructs sequences that will reveal, on the average, more bugs than pure random testing.

Static and dynamic analysis of call chains in java

This work presents a parameterized framework for static and dynamic analysis of call chains in Java components. Such analyses have a wide range of uses in tools for software understanding and testing. We also describe a test coverage tool built with these analyses and the use of the tool on a real-world test suite. Our experiments evaluate the exact precision of several instances of the framework and provide a novel approach for estimating the limits of class analysis technology for computing precise call chains.

Precise Call Graphs for C Programs with Function Pointers

The use of pointers presents serious problems for software productivity tools for software understanding, restructuring, and testing. Pointers enable indirect memory accesses through pointer dereferences, as well as indirect procedure calls (e.g., through function pointers in C). Such indirect accesses and calls can be disambiguated with pointer analysis. In this paper we evaluate the precision of one specific pointer analysis (the FA pointer analysis by Zhang et al.) for the purposes of call graph construction for C programs with function pointers. The analysis is incorporated in a production-strength code-browsing tool from Siemens Corporate Research in which the program call graph is used as a primary tool for code understanding. The FA pointer analysis uses an inexpensive, almost-linear, flow- and context-insensitive algorithm. To measure analysis precision, we compare the call graph constructed by this analysis with the most precise call graph obtainable by a large category of existing pointer analyses. Surprisingly, for all our data programs the FA analysis achieves the best possible precision. This result indicates that for the purposes of call graph construction, inexpensive pointer analyses may provide precision comparable to the precision of expensive pointer analyses.

Web accessibility in the Mid-Atlantic United States: a study of 50 homepages

This paper reports on a study of 50 homepages in the Mid-Atlantic United States to determine what accessibility problems exist. The 50 homepages were evaluated using both the U.S. government's Section 508 guidelines as well as the Web Accessibility Initiative's (WAI) Priority Level 1 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). According to both sets of guidelines, 49 out of 50 sites were found to have accessibility problems, although some of the accessibility problems were minor and easy to fix. There are two troubling findings from this study. The Web sites that had the most accessibility problems were organizations in the Web development and information technology field, which ideally should be the leaders in making the Web more accessible. The Web accessibility software testing tools, which are available to assist people in making their Web sites more accessible, are flawed and inconsistent and require large numbers of manual checks, which many developers may not be able to do. More people need to become aware of the topic of Web accessibility, and the testing tools need to be improved so that once people are aware, it is easier for them to move their sites toward full accessibility.

The Cost of Poor Testing: A U.S. Government Study (Part 2)

Last month we introduced the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study, which attempts to quantify the cost of poor testing. We provided an overview of the study, the national estimates that comprised its conclusions, and a summary. This month we are drilling down into the study to provide the supporting work on software testing methods and tools, along with a detailed look at inadequate infrastructures for testing – infrastructure being the combination of processes, tools, policies and organizations. The purpose of this article is twofold: to provide you with enough details to analyze and improve your own operations and also to provide you with “ammunition” to convince your senior management of the utility and advisability of improving your testing infrastructure and program.

Block-based test data adequacy measurement criteria and test complexity metrics

On the basis of software testing tools we developed for programming languages, we firstly present a new control flowgraph model based on block. In view of the notion of block, we extend the traditional program-based software test data adequacy measurement criteria, and empirically analyze the subsume relation between these measurement criteria. Then, we define four test complexity metrics based on block. They are J-complexity 0; J-complexity 1; J-complexity 1+; J-complexity 2. Finally, we show the Kiviat diagram that makes software quality visible.

Block-based test data adequacy measurement criteria and test complexity metrics

On the basis of software testing tools we developed for programming languages, we firstly present a new control flowgraph model based on block. In view of the notion of block, we extend the traditional program\|based software test data adequacy measurement criteria, and empirically analyze the subsume relation between these measurement criteria. Then, we define four test complexity metrics based on block. They are J\|complexity 0; J\|complexity 1; J\|complexity \{1+\}; J\|complexity 2. Finally, we show the Kiviat diagram that makes software quality visible.

Beyond ASIS

The availability of higher level ASIS libraries is of prime importance for the real success of ASIS technology to facilitate the development of Software Analysis and Testing (SAT) tools. This is due to the fact that ASIS queries are expressed in terms of the syntax of an immensely complex language and do not directly support the objectives of a tool builder. In this paper we discuss two plausible sets of higher levels, tool-oriented queries about the Program Under Analysis (PUA), which ideally do not require the knowledge of ASIS. We first present our experience with using ASIS to develop the front end of SWAT (SoftWare Analysis and Testing), a comprehensive system for static and dynamic (execution-based) software analysis. In it, ASIS is used to retrieve the information about the PUA and store it in Program Data Bases (PDBs). Then, an SAT tool uses the PDBs rather than ASIS to get the necessary information about the PUA. We hypothesize that the access functions to the PDBs can be viewed as second-level queries about the PUA; if well thought-out, a claim not made here, those queries can be used to build a wide class of program browsers. If, however, a more complicated tool is needed, a third level of queries can be specified. We illustrate that possibility by briefly showing how SEER, SWAT's dependency analyzer, uses several PDBs to carry out the dependency analysis whose results are stored in the derived PDBs; they are produced by processing the data in the original, primary PDBs. Again, the relations stored in the secondary PDBs gives rise to the third level queries about the PUA. It is obvious that higher level queries neither have to be implemented by an underlying ASIS layer nor the PDBs have to be used for that purpose. The main motivation here was to do that analysis without a direct use of ASIS. Indeed, we stress the importance of research into various SAT tools that would provide guidance in the definition of an "optimal" query language. In particular, we emphasize the need for ASIS queries that support dynamic, execution-based program analysis.