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Summary: To ensure the quality of software systems, software engineers can make use of a variety of quality assurance approaches, for example, software testing, modern code review, automated static analysis, and build automation. Each of these quality assurance practices have been studied in depth in isolation, but there is a clear knowledge gap when it comes to our understanding of how these approaches are being used in conjunction, or not. In our study, we broadly investigate whether and how these quality assurance approaches are being used in conjunction in the development of 1454 popular open source software projects on GitHub. Our study indicates that typically projects do not follow all quality assurance practices together with high intensity. In fact, we only observe weak correlation among some quality assurance practices. In general, our study provides a deeper understanding of how existing quality assurance approaches are currently being used in Java‐based open source software development. Besides, we specifically zoom in on the more mature projects in our dataset, and generally we observe that more mature projects are more intense in their application of the quality assurance practices, with more focus on their ASAT usage, and code reviewing, but no strong change in their CI usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software testing is regarded as a key activity in the software development cycle, as it helps information technology professionals to design good quality software. Thus, this is an essential activity for the software industry, although with all its nuances high priority is still not being given to learning about it at an academic level. The purpose of this work is to investigate a teaching strategy for software testing which involves acquiring academic skills within a curriculum based on active teaching methodologies. A teaching model was designed for this to coordinate the different areas of a subject, and then a controlled quasi-experiment was carried out in a post-graduate course to evaluate the application of this model. The results obtained demonstrate that there was a considerable learning gain in the experimental group that adopted the teaching approach, when compared with the control group that relied on a traditional approach. The student t test was employed to determine the learning efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coding challenges are often used as a pre-interview step to evaluate software engineering and test automation candidates for development and quality assurance jobs. But does the practice actually result in hiring better coders? What are the best practices for coding challenges? Should employers who want to hire high-performing software engineers use coding challenges? This article uses a literature review to explore these questions, as well as how coding challenges fit into the broader range of coder assessment techniques, whether it is a fair and valid way to compare programmers, and whether there are any variables that inhibit a potential employer's ability to compare performance this way. The recommendations will help practitioners who also have hiring responsibilities make more informed decisions about whether to incorporate coding challenges into the hiring process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses software tools for automating testing of software products. The authors analyzed the impact of test automation frameworks on the field of software development, and also analyzed a number of tasks for testers that can be solved using these tools. The IT sphere has been penetrating all aspects of human life for a long time, but only in the last few years has there been an unprecedented trend of a rapid growth in the number of programs, websites, specialized software products, and the like. This rapid growth is primarily due to the need to simplify the performance of routine labor-intensive tasks in many spheres of life, until recently people performed. Already now, a variety of software is used in almost all spheres of life and subsequently will fully cover all non-creative areas of human activity. The widespread use of computer technology has led not only to an increase in the number of software, but also to a rapid growth in requirements for these software products. Their correct implementation, time, depends not only on the user, but also on entire branches of commercial and state government. Testing is one of the most important stages of quality control in the software development process. Automated testing is an integral part of it. It uses software to create, run tests, and check the results of their execution. Test automation helps to optimize testing time: it provides testers with the ability to quickly and efficiently conduct tests, to be able to easily change them, which simplifies the testing process itself. The authors conducted a study and comparative analysis of the traditional testing methodology and Agile methodology and made conclusions about their advantages and disadvantages. The main goal of this study is to analyze the processes of automation of testing software products, to determine the main advantages and disadvantages of various test automation frameworks, to draw conclusions regarding the appropriateness of using one or another solution and tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: Testing is fundamental in the software development process. Nevertheless, testing education faces the key challenge of ensuring that undergraduate students acquire knowledge and skills they need for their future careers by matching what is taught in the classroom to industry standards. In this context, gamification can be used as an alternative educational approach. It uses game elements in real-world contexts in order to increase people's motivation and engagement in tasks that require external stimuli, especially in educational contexts. Objective: Reporting on results of an experimental study designed to assess the impact of gamification on software testing education, as well as reporting on the experience of building a supporting gamified platform. Method: We performed a systematic literature mapping aiming at characterizing how gamification has been explored in the software testing context. In addition, some of the problems faced by testing education were identified through an ad-hoc search. Then, we developed a gamified approach and a platform that have been used to run five 4-hour functional testing classes with undergraduate students from four Brazilian institutions of higher education. Results: Overall, students who learned with the traditional approach felt more motivated than those who learned with the gamified approach. The performance of both groups was similar, however, feedback questionnaires indicated that the gamified class was more attractive (in terms of attention) and funnier. Moreover, we observed that building a gamified platform is complex and challenging, particularly for the definition of the game mechanics and dynamics. Conclusion: Although the results were neutral performance-wise for both groups, and the motivation of students of the control group was slightly higher when compared with the experimental group, the experience of having used gamification is considered positive, as it provided a more enjoyable and funny environment, both from the researcher's and students' point of view. Furthermore, with this experience we foresee what we can do better in terms of gamified teaching in future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Romanian Journal of Information Technology & Automatic Control / Revista Română de Informatică și Automatică is the property of National Institute for Research & Development in Informatics - ICI Bucharest and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Testing scientific software is a difficult task due to their inherent complexity and the lack of test oracles. In addition, these software systems are usually developed by end-user developers who are not normally trained as professional software developers nor testers. These factors often lead to inadequate testing. Metamorphic testing (MT) is a simple yet effective testing technique for testing such applications. Even though MT is a wellknown technique in the software testing community, it is not very well utilized by the scientific software developers. The objective of this paper is to present MT as an effective technique for testing scientific software. To this end, we discuss why MT is an appropriate testing technique for scientists and engineers who are not primarily trained as software developers. Specifically, how it can be used to conduct systematic and effective testing on programs that do not have test oracles without requiring additional testing tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research in defect prediction has proposed approaches to determine which files require additional testing resources. However, practitioners typically create tests at a higher level of abstraction, which may span across many files. In this paper, we study software testing, especially test resource prioritization, from a different perspective. We use topic models to generate topics that provide a high-level view of a system, allowing developers to look at the test case coverage from a different angle. We propose measures of how well tested and defect prone a topic is, allowing us to discover which topics are well tested and which are defect prone. We conduct case studies on the histories of Mylyn, Eclipse, and NetBeans. We find that 34–78% of topics are shared between source code and test files, indicating that we can use topic models to study testing; well-tested topics are usually less defect prone, defect-prone topics are usually undertested; we can predict which topics are defect prone but not well tested with an average precision and recall of 75% and 77%, respectively; our approach complements traditional prediction-based approaches by saving testing and code inspection effort; and our approach is not particularly sensitive to the parameters that we use. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Testing is always important for Software Quality Assurance (SQA) activities and key cost multiplier in software development. The decision to automate or not to automate a test case is critical. In this paper we discuss the possibility of test automation and in relation to the trade-off between manual and automated test cases. We purpose a Production cost frontier based technique to distinguish the point of automation and manual test within the cost constraints. Our objective is to identify the facts that up to what extant a testing process can be automated. In this paper a cost model is proposed for deciding the proportion of automated and manual testing. The objective is to find best possible combination of these two and production possibility in one type by eliminating the other type of testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software testing is the most significant analytic quality assurance for software products, but it is very expensive and time consuming process. This limitation is overcome by automatic testing to reduce high cost and to increase reliability & efficiency as compared to manual testing. Basis path testing is a coverage criterion of software testing that can detect almost sixty five percent of errors in program under test. In this paper a new fitness function has been proposed named as Extended Level Branch (ExLB) Fitness function for basis path testing using simple genetic algorithm (SGA) and hybrid genetic algorithm (hill climbing with selection operator). Using a triangle classifier as program under test, performance of SGA with Simply Combined Fitness Function, SGA with ExLB Fitness Function and HGA with ExLB Fitness Function have been compared using MATLAB. Experimental results showed that SGA with ExLB Fitness Function (proposed approach) performs better than the SGA with Simply Combined Fitness Function and HGA using ExLB Fitness Function is better than all these approaches in terms of test data generation under basis path coverage criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents tCF (testCaseFramework) - a domain specific language with corresponding toolchain for specification-based software testing of embedded software. tCF is designed for efficient preparation of maintainable and intelligible test cases and for testing process automation, as it allows to generate platform specific test cases for various testing levels. The article describes the essential parts of the tCF meta-model and the applied concept of platform specific test cases generators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risk-based testing has a high potential to improve the software development and test process as it helps to optimize the allocation of resources and provides decision support for the management. But for many organizations, its integration into an existing test process is a challenging task. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing work and present a generic testing methodology enhancing an established test process to address risks. On this basis, we develop a procedure on how risk-based testing can be introduced in a test process and derive a stage model for its integration. We then evaluate our approach for introducing risk-based testing by means of an industrial study and discuss benefits, prerequisites and challenges to introduce it. Potential benefits of risk-based testing identified in the studied project are faster detection of defects resulting in an earlier release, a more reliable release quality statement as well as the involved test-process optimization. As necessary prerequisites for risk-based testing, we identified an inhomogeneous distribution of risks associated with the various parts of the tested software system as well as consolidated technical and business views on it. Finally, the identified challenges of introducing risk-based testing are reliable risk assessment in the context of complex systems, the availability of experts for risk assessment as well as established tool supports for test management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Testing provides a primary means for assuring software in safety-critical systems. To demonstrate, particularly to a certification authority, that sufficient testing has been performed, it is necessary to achieve the test coverage levels recommended or mandated by safety standards and industry guidelines. Mutation testing provides an alternative or complementary method of measuring test sufficiency, but has not been widely adopted in the safety-critical industry. In this study, we provide an empirical evaluation of the application of mutation testing to airborne software systems which have already satisfied the coverage requirements for certification. Specifically, we apply mutation testing to safety-critical software developed using high-integrity subsets of C and Ada, identify the most effective mutant types, and analyze the root causes of failures in test cases. Our findings show how mutation testing could be effective where traditional structural coverage analysis and manual peer review have failed. They also show that several testing issues have origins beyond the test activity, and this suggests improvements to the requirements definition and coding process. Our study also examines the relationship between program characteristics and mutation survival and considers how program size can provide a means for targeting test areas most likely to have dormant faults. Industry feedback is also provided, particularly on how mutation testing can be integrated into a typical verification life cycle of airborne software. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a systematic meta-analysis of 27 studies that investigate the impact of Test-Driven Development (TDD) on external code quality and productivity. The results indicate that, in general, TDD has a small positive effect on quality but little to no discernible effect on productivity. However, subgroup analysis has found both the quality improvement and the productivity drop to be much larger in industrial studies in comparison with academic studies. A larger drop of productivity was found in studies where the difference in test effort between the TDD and the control group's process was significant. A larger improvement in quality was also found in the academic studies when the difference in test effort is substantial; however, no conclusion could be derived regarding the industrial studies due to the lack of data. Finally, the influence of developer experience and task size as moderator variables was investigated, and a statistically significant positive correlation was found between task size and the magnitude of the improvement in quality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents an ISO/IEC 15504 II conformant test assessment approach. It argues the need for such a method by reviewing the common approaches of ISTQB, TMM and TPI/TMAP and it outlines the first version of Test SPICE. The paper shows how ISO/IEC 15504V was used as a starting point and it describes the actual model [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No abstract received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at quality assurance in software development as of 2012. The author presents several recommendations for improving the software testing process and assuring that software meets the business customer's needs at an acceptable quality level (AQL). Recommendations address topics including the involvement of the quality team from the start of a project and prioritizing among defects discovered through testing.