Leveraging Model-driven Testing Practices to Improve Software Quality at Microsoft

摘要

One area that the IE team believes holds promise for significantly improving our software process and in particular, software quality, is leveraging model-driven development practices. Our current improvement efforts are focused on three key areas: requirements engineering, architectural analysis and most importantly, testing. Some key factors driving this adoption are the strong emphasis on addressing customer scenarios, the need for improved product traceability, increased testability, security and reliability of our product architecture and more systematic and efficient process encompassing test design, generation and execution. This paper chronicles our ongoing effort to introduce model-driven testing practices, which we are aiming to introduce to the team during the IE7.X and IE8 release timeframe. The goal of this effort is to reduce the overall test cycle through the automatic generation and execution of tests based on behavioral models of IE. Our approach, which actually builds on our recent improvement efforts in requirements engineering, leverages the UML (Unified Modeling Language) and its concept of use cases. Use cases, together with behavioral diagrams such as activity, sequence or state chart diagrams, are used to specify our customer scenarios. These behavioral diagrams are then annotated by testers with test-specific directives or test requirements and processed by an automatic test generator developed by Microsoft Research, with the generated tests being executed using an IE-specific test execution environment. This paper outlines our motivation for exploring the topic of model-driven development. Emphasis is placed on describing the modeling methodology and its impact on the existing requirements and testing processes rather than providing detailed descriptions of the underlying technology and tools. Examples are given to illustrate and emphasize key aspects of the methodology and use the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feature of IE7.