Charette sessions

Last Updated: November 29, 2010

Architecture support for Testing: automation of software test

In relation with the AST 2011 theme of “relating software design to test automation”, the Charette sessions this year will coordinate with another ongoing initiative on “Architecture support for Testing”, focusing especially on automation of architecture-based testing. The Charette is coordinated by Dr. Henry Muccini, University of L'Aquila, Italy

Background

Software architecture and software testing have been already considered together, but there is much to be gained from cooperation between them. The architecture of a system can have a very direct impact on its testability and the testing can provide valuable feedback to the architectural design process, as well as having a big impact on the quality of the delivered system.

In an attempt to progress the cooperation between these fields, a joint initiative has been launched by the Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh (US), the University of L'Aquila (Italy), and ISTI – CNR, Pisa (Italy).

In the context of this initiative, two working meetings have already been held. The first meeting, which joined several practitioners in Pittsburgh and was prioritized based on industrial needs, produced set of 29 important “model problems” in architecture’s supported testing. These problems have been described, prioritized, and discussed with practitioners and researchers. These model testing problems are all problems that, if solved, would result in a significant improvement over current testing practice. In a second meeting among researchers in Pisa these problems have been further discussed and relevant research directions have been sketched (a short report is available at http://labsewiki.isti.cnr.it/projects/ast/ast2011pisa/). In the future these outcomes will serve as a research agenda for an evolving collaboration of researchers on the topic. Charette sessions organization

The Charette sessions @ AST 2011 will provide attendees with the opportunity to learn about recent results on the above described initiative. Attendees will also have the opportunity to contribute their opinions and ideas to this work. The sessions will be organized as follows:

Day one (May 23, 1:00-2:30 pm):

  • a short presentation on architecture support for testing and the current joint effort will be provided, to set up the context and provide background information;
  • three highly scored model problems will be selected, and briefly presented to the audience (they are currently available at http://labsewiki.isti.cnr.it/_media/projects/ast/ast2011pisa/ast_model_problems_ranked.pdf);
  • working groups will be created with this goal in mind: to provide an "automated" solution to the three model problems. The audience will be asked to focus on potential tool supported technologies that may help in finding an automated solution to the selected model problems.

Day two (May 24, 5:00-5:45 pm):

  • working groups will present their findings. Participants will vote to select the best working groups;
  • overall conclusions will be drawn.

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