Context: Quality assurance effort, especially testing effort, is often a major cost factor during software development, which sometimes consumes more than 50% of the overall development effort. Consequently, one major goal is often to reduce testing effort. Objective: The main goal of the systematic mapping study is the identification of existing approaches that are able to reduce testing effort. Therefore, an overview should be presented both for researchers and practitioners in order to identify, on the one hand, future research directions and, on the other hand, potential for improvements in practical environments. Method: Two researchers performed a systematic mapping study, focusing on four databases with an initial result set of 4020 articles. Results: In total, we selected and categorized 144 articles. Five different areas were identified that exploit different ways to reduce testing effort: approaches that predict defect-prone parts or defect content, automation, test input reduction approaches, quality assurance techniques applied before testing, and test strategy approaches. Conclusion: The results reflect an increased interest in this topic in recent years. A lot of different approaches have been developed, refined, and evaluated in different environments. The highest attention was found with respect to automation and prediction approaches. In addition, some input reduction approaches were found. However, in terms of combining early quality assurance activities with testing to reduce test effort, only a small number of approaches were found. Due to the continuous challenge of reducing test effort, future research in this area is expected.

http://romisatriawahono.net/lecture/rm/survey/software%20engineering/Software%20Testing/Elberzhager%20-%20Reducing%20test%20effort%20-%202012.pdf

Reducing test effort: A systematic mapping study on existing approaches

A document analysis, commenting, and reporting system provides tools that automate quality assurance analysis tailored to specific document types. As one example, the specific document type may be a requirements specification and the system may tag different parts of requirements, including actors, entities, modes, and a remainder. However, the flexibility of the system permits analysis of any other document type, such as instruction manuals and best practices guides. The system helps avoid confusion over the document when it is delivered because of non-standard terms, ambiguous language, conflicts between document sections, incomplete or inaccurate descriptions, size and complexity of the document, and other issues.

Document analysis, commenting, and reporting system

A requirements testing system facilitates the review and analysis of requirement statements for software applications. The requirements testing system generates test artifacts from the requirement statements. The test artifacts characterize the requirements statements to provide valuable analysis information that aids understanding whether the requirement statements are testable, what the intentions of the requirement statements are, and other useful analysis information. Because the system generates the analysis information from the requirement statements, the system provides benefits in terms of early feedback along the software application development timeline.

Analysis system for test artifact generation

A computer-implemented method identifies textual statement relationships. Textual statement pairs including a first and second textual statement are identified, and parsed word group pairs are extracted from first and second textual statements. The parsed word groups are compared, and a parsed word score for each statement pair is calculated. Word vectors for the first and second textual statements are created and compared. A word vector score is calculated based on the comparison of the word vectors for the first and second textual statements. A match score is determined for the textual statement pair, with the match score being representative of at least one of the parsed word score and the word vector score.

System for Identifying Textual Relationships

Software testing is an important activity in the Software Development Life Cycle. To cut down the time and cost of manual testing and to increase the reliability of the software, researchers and practitioners have proposed various tools and techniques for automation of software testing. A great deal of research effort has been spent on finding efficient methods for different aspects of test case automation. Many researchers have proposed various techniques on automatic test case generation and it still remains an area of interest for them. This paper presents a systematic survey of the work done in the field of automatic generation of test case particularly related to UML based automated test case generation.

/pdf/systematic-review-of-automatic-test-case-generation-by-uml-ogxgxicyhk.pdf

Systematic Review of Automatic Test Case Generation by UML Diagrams

Testing of software is a time-consuming activity which requires a great deal of planning and resources. Model-based testing is gaining importance as a research issue. In scenario-based testing, test scenarios are used for generating test cases, test drivers etc. UML is widely used to describe analysis and design specifications of software development. UML models are important source of information for test case design. UML activity diagrams describe the realization of the operation in design phase and also support description of parallel activities and synchronization aspects involved in different activities perfectly. In this paper we generate test scenarios from activity diagrams, which achieve test adequacy criteria perfectly. Finally we generate test cases by analyzing the respective sequence and class diagrams of each scenario, which achieves maximum path coverage criteria. Also in our approach, the cost of test model creation is reduced as design is reused.

/pdf/a-novel-approach-for-scenario-based-test-case-generation-2433602dmi.pdf

P. Nanda

Papers

A Novel Approach for Scenario-Based Test Case Generation