Software testing in the XXI century: methods, tools and new approaches to manage, control and evaluate this critical phase

摘要

Software Testing is a critical part of the whole process of development, on which the quality of the products delivered strictly depends. In this Thesis we present our journey through the world of Software Testing, ranging over many fields from definition to organization, from its applicability to analysis of its effectiveness, because testing activity is not limited to the detection of "bugs". The general aims are proposing both a global view of the testing phase, which exploits and unifies the knowledge from the industrial reality and the research context and putting research in practice. For this, starting from test planning we analyze the different testing stages pointing out their characteristic problems and presenting our original proposals (methods, tools or new approaches based on UML specifications) for solving them. In particular we also define procedural strategies, which support suitable testing choices since the first phases of development, and provide the reader with practical and quantitative guidance all along the testing phase. All the proposals presented are the result of a strict collaboration with software developers looking for solutions for their problems and improvements in the different activities of the testing process. This collaboration imposes us two important constraints: usability, i.e. the methodologies as far as possible must adapt themselves to the modelling notations and procedures commonly used by industries and real environments and not vice versa; and automation, i.e., increasing as much as possible the mechanization in test cases derivation, execution and validation, consequently reducing the manual labour. We adopt therefore the leading principle of providing readers with some easy-to-apply and low-cost methodologies, which maximize the automation and minimize as much as possible the required additional formalism or ad-hoc effort specifically for testing purposes.