No Arabic abstract
Nowadays, software artifacts are ubiquitous in our lives being an essential part of home appliances, cars, cell phones, and even in more critical activities like aeronautics and health sciences. In this context software failures may produce enormous losses, either economical or, in the worst case, in human lives. Software analysis is an area in software engineering concerned with the application of diverse techniques in order to prove the absence of errors in software pieces. In many cases different analysis techniques are applied by following specific methodological combinations that ensure better results. These interactions between tools are usually carried out at the user level and it is not supported by the tools. In this work we present HeteroGenius, a framework conceived to develop tools that allow users to perform hybrid analysis of heterogeneous software specifications. HeteroGenius was designed prioritising the possibility of adding new specification languages and analysis tools and enabling a synergic relation of the techniques under a graphical interface satisfying several well-known usability enhancement criteria. As a case-study we implemented the functionality of Dynamite on top of HeteroGenius.
A major challenge in testing software product lines is efficiency. In particular, testing a product line should take less effort than testing each and every product individually. We address this issue in the context of input-output conformance testing, which is a formal theory of model-based testing. We extend the notion of conformance testing on input-output featured transition systems with the novel concept of spinal test suites. We show how this concept dispenses with retesting the common behavior among different, but similar, products of a software product line.
Software testing is normally used to check the validity of a program. Test oracle performs an important role in software testing. The focus in this research is to perform class level test by introducing a testing framework. A technique is developed to generate test oracle for specification-based software testing using Vienna Development Method (VDM++) formal language. A three stage translation process, of VDM++ specifications of container classes to C++ test oracle classes, is described in this paper. It is also presented that how derived test oracle is integrated into a proposed functional testing framework. This technique caters object oriented features such as inheritance and aggregation, but concurrency is not considered in this work. Translation issues, limitations and evaluation of the technique are also discussed. The proposed approach is illustrated with the help of popular triangle problem case study.
Agile software teams are expected to follow a number of specific Team Practices (TPs) during each iteration, such as estimating the effort (points) required to complete user stories and coordinating the management of the codebase with the delivery of features. For software engineering instructors trying to teach such TPs to student teams, manually auditing teams if teams are following the TPs and improving over time is tedious, time-consuming and error-prone. It is even more difficult when those TPs involve two or more tools. For example, starting work on a feature in a project-management tool such as Pivotal Tracker should usually be followed relatively quickly by the creation of a feature branch on GitHub. Merging a feature branch on GitHub should usually be followed relatively quickly by deploying the new feature to a staging server for customer feedback. Few systems are designed specifically to audit such TPs, and existing ones, as far as we know, are limited to a single specific tool. We present Bluejay, an open-source extensible platform that uses the APIs of multiple tools to collect raw data, synthesize it into TP measurements, and present dashboards to audit the TPs. A key insight in Bluejays design is that TPs can be expressed in terminology similar to that used for modeling and auditing Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. Bluejay therefore builds on mature tools used in that ecosystem and adapts them for describing, auditing, and reporting on TPs. Bluejay currently consumes data from five different widely-used development tools, and can be customized by connecting it to any service with a REST API. Video showcase available at governify.io/showcase/bluejay
There is growing acknowledgement within the software engineering community that a theory of software development is needed to integrate the myriad methodologies that are currently popular, some of which are based on opposing perspectives. We have been developing such a theory for a number of years. In this paper, we overview our theory and report on a recent ontological analysis of the theory constructs. We suggest that, once fully developed, this theory, or one similar to it, may be applied to support situated software development, by providing an overarching model within which software initiatives might be categorised and understood. Such understanding would inevitably lead to greater predictability with respect to outcomes.
For software to be reliable and resilient, it is widely accepted that tests must be created and maintained alongside the software itself. One safeguard from vulnerabilities and failures in code is to ensure correct behavior on the boundaries between the input space sub-domains. So-called boundary value analysis (BVA) and boundary value testing (BVT) techniques aim to exercise those boundaries and increase test effectiveness. However, the concepts of BVA and BVT themselves are not generally well defined, and it is not clear how to identify relevant sub-domains, and thus the boundaries delineating them, given a specification. This has limited adoption and hindered automation. We clarify BVA and BVT and introduce Boundary Value Exploration (BVE) to describe techniques that support them by helping to detect and identify boundary inputs. Additionally, we propose two concrete BVE techniques based on information-theoretic distance functions: (i) an algorithm for boundary detection and (ii) the usage of software visualization to explore the behavior of the software under test and identify its boundary behavior. As an initial evaluation, we apply these techniques on a much used and well-tested date handling library. Our results reveal questionable behavior at boundaries highlighted by our techniques. In conclusion, we argue that the boundary value exploration that our techniques enable is a step towards automated boundary value analysis and testing, fostering their wider use and improving test effectiveness and efficiency.