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This article provides a taxonomy for risk-based testing that serves as a tool to define, tailor, or assess such approaches. In this setting, the taxonomy is used to systematically identify deviations between the requirements from public standards and the individual testing approaches., open access

In the report “Towards Our Common Digital Future”, the WBGU makes it clear that sustainability strategies and concepts need to be fundamentally further developed in the age of digitalization. Only if digital change and the Transformation towards Sustainability are synchronized can we succeed in advancing climate and Earth-system protection and in making social progress in human development. Without formative political action, digital change will further accelerate resource and energy consumption, and exacerbate damage to the environment and the climate. It is therefore an urgent political task to create the conditions needed to place digitalization at the service of sustainable development.

Das Gutachten „Unsere gemeinsame digitale Zukunft“ macht deutlich, dass Nachhaltigkeitsstrategien und -konzepte im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung grundlegend weiterentwickelt werden müssen. Nur wenn der digitale Wandel und die Transformation zur Nachhaltigkeit konstruktiv verzahnt werden, kann es gelingen, Klima- und Erdsystemschutz sowie soziale Fortschritte menschlicher Entwicklung voranzubringen. Ohne aktive politische Gestaltung wird der digitale Wandel den Ressourcen- und Energieverbrauch sowie die Schädigung von Umwelt und Klima weiter beschleunigen. Daher ist es eine vordringliche politische Aufgabe, Bedingungen dafür zu schaffen, die Digitalisierung in den Dienst nachhaltiger Entwicklung zu stellen.

Performance bugs, i.e., program source code that is unnecessarily inefficient, have received significant attention by the research community in recent years. A number of empirical studies have investigated how these bugs differ from 'ordinary' bugs that cause functional deviations and several approaches to aid their detection, localization, and removal have been proposed. Many of these approaches focus on certain subclasses of performance bugs, e.g., those resulting from redundant computations or unnecessary synchronization, and the evaluation of their effectiveness is usually limited to a small number of known instances of these bugs. To provide researchers working on performance bug detection and localization techniques with a larger corpus of performance bugs to evaluate against, we conduct a study of more than 700 performance bug fixing commits across 13 popular open source projects written in C and C++ and investigate the relative frequency of bug types as well as their complexity. Our results show that many of these fixes follow a small set of bug patterns, that they are contributed by experienced developers, and that the number of lines needed to fix performance bugs is highly project dependent.

In the report “Towards Our Common Digital Future”, the WBGU makes it clear that sustainability strategies and concepts need to be fundamentally further developed in the age of digitalization. Only if digital change and the Transformation towards Sustainability are synchronized can we succeed in advancing climate and Earth-system protection and in making social progress in human development. Without formative political action, digital change will further accelerate resource and energy consumption, and exacerbate damage to the environment and the climate. It is therefore an urgent political task to create the conditions needed to place digitalization at the service of sustainable development.

Das Gutachten „Unsere gemeinsame digitale Zukunft“ macht deutlich, dass Nachhaltigkeitsstrategien und -konzepte im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung grundlegend weiterentwickelt werden müssen. Nur wenn der digitale Wandel und die Transformation zur Nachhaltigkeit konstruktiv verzahnt werden, kann es gelingen, Klima- und Erdsystemschutz sowie soziale Fortschritte menschlicher Entwicklung voranzubringen. Ohne aktive politische Gestaltung wird der digitale Wandel den Ressourcen- und Energieverbrauch sowie die Schädigung von Umwelt und Klima weiter beschleunigen. Daher ist es eine vordringliche politische Aufgabe, Bedingungen dafür zu schaffen, die Digitalisierung in den Dienst nachhaltiger Entwicklung zu stellen.

Performance bugs, i.e., program source code that is unnecessarily inefficient, have received significant attention by the research community in recent years. A number of empirical studies have investigated how these bugs differ from 'ordinary' bugs that cause functional deviations and several approaches to aid their detection, localization, and removal have been proposed. Many of these approaches focus on certain subclasses of performance bugs, e.g., those resulting from redundant computations or unnecessary synchronization, and the evaluation of their effectiveness is usually limited to a small number of known instances of these bugs. To provide researchers working on performance bug detection and localization techniques with a larger corpus of performance bugs to evaluate against, we conduct a study of more than 700 performance bug fixing commits across 13 popular open source projects written in C and C++ and investigate the relative frequency of bug types as well as their complexity. Our results show that many of these fixes follow a small set of bug patterns, that they are contributed by experienced developers, and that the number of lines needed to fix performance bugs is highly project dependent.

Software testing has often to be done under severe pressure due to limited resources and a challenging time schedule facing the demand to assure the fulfillment of the software requirements. In addition, testing should unveil those software defects that harm the mission-critical functions of the software. Risk-based testing uses risk (re-)assessments to steer all phases of the test process in order to optimize testing efforts and limit risks of the software-based system. Due to its importance and high practical relevance several risk-based testing approaches were proposed in academia and industry. This paper presents a taxonomy of risk-based testing providing a framework to understand, categorize, assess, and compare risk-based testing approaches to support their selection and tailoring for specific purposes. The taxonomy is aligned with the consideration of risks in all phases of the test process and consists of the top-level classes risk drivers, risk assessment, and risk-based test process. The taxonomy of risk-based testing has been developed by analyzing the work presented in available publications on risk-based testing. Afterwards, it has been applied to the work on risk-based testing presented in this special section of the International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1801.06812

Edge Computing is a new distributed Cloud Computing paradigm in which computing and storage capabilities are pushed to the topological edge of a network. However, various standards and implementations are promoted by different initiatives. Lead by a reference architecture model for Edge Computing, current initiatives are analyzed by explorative content analysis. Providing two main contributions to the field, we present, first, how current initiatives are characterized, and second, a roadmap for sustainable Edge Computing relating three dimensions of sustainable development to four cross-concerns of Edge Computing. Findings show that most initiatives are internationally organized software development projects; important branches are currently telecom and industrial sectors; most addressed is the network virtualization layer. The roadmap reveals numerous chances and risks of Edge Computing related to sustainable development; such as the use of renewable energies, biases, new business models, increase and decrease of energy consumption, responsiveness, monitoring and traceability., Comment: 15 pages

This article provides a taxonomy for risk-based testing that serves as a tool to define, tailor, or assess risk-based testing approaches in general and to instantiate risk-based testing approaches for the current testing standards ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119, ETSI EG and OWASP Security Testing Guide in particular. We demonstrate the usefulness of the taxonomy by applying it to the aforementioned standards as well as to the risk-based testing approaches SmartTesting, RACOMAT, PRISMA and risk-based test case prioritization using fuzzy expert systems. In this setting, the taxonomy is used to systematically identify deviations between the standards' requirements and the individual testing approaches so that we are able to position and compare the testing approaches and discuss their potential for practical application.

In order to optimize the usage of testing efforts and to assess risks of software-based systems, risk-based testing uses risk (re-)assessments to steer all phases in a test process. Several risk-based testing approaches have been proposed in academia and/or applied in industry, so that the determination of principal concepts and methods in risk-based testing is needed to enable a comparison of the weaknesses and strengths of different risk-based testing approaches. In this chapter we provide an (updated) taxonomy of risk-based testing aligned with risk considerations in all phases of a test process. It consists of three top-level classes, i.e., contextual setup, risk assessment, and risk-based test strategy. This taxonomy provides a framework to understand, categorize, assess and compare risk-based testing approaches to support their selection and tailoring for specific purposes. Furthermore, we position four recent risk-based testing approaches into the taxonomy in order to demonstrate its application and alignment with available risk-based testing approaches.

Graphical notations designed by committees in the context of standardization bodies, like Object Management Group (OMG), are widely used in the industry and academia. Naive users of these notations have limited background on visualization, documentation and specification of work ows, data or software systems. Several studies have pointed out the fact that these notations do not convey any particular seman- tics and their understanding is not perceptually immediate. As reported in these studies, this lack of semantic transparency increases the cog- nitive load to differentiate between concepts, slows down the learning and comprehension of the language constructs. This paper reports on a set of experiments that confirm the lack of semantic transparency of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as designed by OMG and compares this standard to alternative solutions where naive users are involved in the design of the notations to speed-up the learning of these languages to new users.

Graphical notations designed by committees in the context of standardization bodies, like Object Management Group (OMG), are widely used in the industry and academia. Naive users of these notations have limited background on visualization, documentation and specification of work ows, data or software systems. Several studies have pointed out the fact that these notations do not convey any particular seman- tics and their understanding is not perceptually immediate. As reported in these studies, this lack of semantic transparency increases the cog- nitive load to differentiate between concepts, slows down the learning and comprehension of the language constructs. This paper reports on a set of experiments that confirm the lack of semantic transparency of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as designed by OMG and compares this standard to alternative solutions where naive users are involved in the design of the notations to speed-up the learning of these languages to new users.

Security testing aims at validating software system requirements related to security properties like confidentiality, integrity, authentication, authorization, availability, and non-repudiation. Although security testing techniques are available for many years, there has been little approaches that allow for specification of test cases at a higher level of abstraction, for enabling guidance on test identification and specification as well as for automated test generation. Model-based security testing (MBST) is a relatively new field and especially dedicated to the systematic and efficient specification and documentation of security test objectives, security test cases and test suites, as well as to their automated or semi-automated generation. In particular, the combination of security modelling and test generation approaches is still a challenge in research and of high interest for industrial applications. MBST includes e.g. security functional testing, model-based fuzzing, risk- and threat-oriented testing, and the usage of security test patterns. This paper provides a survey on MBST techniques and the related models as well as samples of new methods and tools that are under development in the European ITEA2-project DIAMONDS., Comment: In Proceedings MBT 2012, arXiv:1202.5826

Modern vehicles integrate an increasing number of features. The interaction between these features is often error prone and requires extensive testing in order to ensure correctness and reliability. This thesis presents an approach to test case generation that enables the systematic coverage of feature interactions. A prerequisite to test case generation is a test model that: describes potential error prone paths; and limits the state space to a feasible size. The presented approach uses task models to model features and their interactions. These models are defined in a new task modeling language, TTask. This thesis also introduces new test selection criteria enabling the systematic selection of feature interaction scenarios. The thereby achieved systematic coverage of feature interaction scenarios is demonstrated for real-world systems at BMW Group., Die Anzahl der Funktionen in modernen Fahrzeugen wächst stetig. Unvorhergesehene Interaktionen zwischen Funktionen führen oft zu Fehlern. Um diese Fehler aufzudecken, sind systematische Tests notwendig. Diese Arbeit stellt einen neuen Ansatz zur Testfallgenerierung vor, der den systematischen Test von Interaktionen ermöglicht. Die Generierung von Testfällen erfordert ein geeignetes Testmodell, das potentielle Fehlerszenarien beschreibt und den Zustandsraum auf eine beherrschbare Größe einschränkt. Der vorgestellte Ansatz erreicht dies durch die Verwendung von Aufgabenmodellen. Diese Arbeit führt TTask, eine neue Modellierungssprache für Aufgabenmodelle, ein, sowie darauf aufbauende Testauswahlkriterien, die gezielt kritische Aufgabenabfolgen auswählen. Die so erreichte systematische Abdeckung von Funktionsinteraktionen wird anhand realer Systeme der BMW Group gezeigt.

Modern vehicles integrate an increasing number of features. The interaction between these features is often error prone and requires extensive testing in order to ensure correctness and reliability. This thesis presents an approach to test case generation that enables the systematic coverage of feature interactions. A prerequisite to test case generation is a test model that: describes potential error prone paths; and limits the state space to a feasible size. The presented approach uses task models to model features and their interactions. These models are defined in a new task modeling language, TTask. This thesis also introduces new test selection criteria enabling the systematic selection of feature interaction scenarios. The thereby achieved systematic coverage of feature interaction scenarios is demonstrated for real-world systems at BMW Group., Die Anzahl der Funktionen in modernen Fahrzeugen wächst stetig. Unvorhergesehene Interaktionen zwischen Funktionen führen oft zu Fehlern. Um diese Fehler aufzudecken, sind systematische Tests notwendig. Diese Arbeit stellt einen neuen Ansatz zur Testfallgenerierung vor, der den systematischen Test von Interaktionen ermöglicht. Die Generierung von Testfällen erfordert ein geeignetes Testmodell, das potentielle Fehlerszenarien beschreibt und den Zustandsraum auf eine beherrschbare Größe einschränkt. Der vorgestellte Ansatz erreicht dies durch die Verwendung von Aufgabenmodellen. Diese Arbeit führt TTask, eine neue Modellierungssprache für Aufgabenmodelle, ein, sowie darauf aufbauende Testauswahlkriterien, die gezielt kritische Aufgabenabfolgen auswählen. Die so erreichte systematische Abdeckung von Funktionsinteraktionen wird anhand realer Systeme der BMW Group gezeigt.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) constitutes a modern, standards-based and technology-independent paradigm and architectural style for distributed enterprise computing. The SOA style promotes the publishing, discovery, and binding of loosely-coupled, network-accessible software services. With SOA systems operating in distributed and heterogeneous execution environments, the engineers of such systems are confined by the limits of traditional software engineering. In this position paper, we scrutinize the fundamental tenets underpinning the development and maintenance of SOA systems. In particular, we introduce software service engineering as an emerging discipline that entails a departure from traditional software engineering disciplines, embracing the ‘open world assumption’. We characterize software service engineering via seven defining tenets. Lastly, we survey related research challenges.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) constitutes a modern, standards-based and technology-independent paradigm and architectural style for distributed enterprise computing. The SOA style promotes the publishing, discovery, and binding of loosely-coupled, network-accessible software services. With SOA systems operating in distributed and heterogeneous execution environments, the engineers of such systems are confined by the limits of traditional software engineering. In this position paper, we scrutinize the fundamental tenets underpinning the development and maintenance of SOA systems. In particular, we introduce software service engineering as an emerging discipline that entails a departure from traditional software engineering disciplines, embracing the ‘open world assumption’. We characterize software service engineering via seven defining tenets. Lastly, we survey related research challenges.

With the continuing advances in semiconductor technology driving the rise in complexity of electronic embedded systems, there is a demand for the development of high level modelling environments for computer-aided design. The modelling of highly repetitive structures in graphical form poses a particular challenge if a hierarchical approach is not adopted. This paper proposes a mechanism for describing such component structures in a compact form based upon extensions of the Array Oriented Language (Array-OL). An example is given as to how the structure described is subsequently mapped into VHDL code.