Secure Software Integration and Reliability Improvement 

About: Secure Software Integration and Reliability Improvement is an academic conference. The conference publishes majorly in the area(s): Software quality & Software system. Over the lifetime, 223 publications have been published by the conference receiving 1991 citations.

Historical Value-Based Approach for Cost-Cognizant Test Case Prioritization to Improve the Effectiveness of Regression Testing

Abstract: Regression testing has been used to support software testing activities and assure the acquirement of appropriate quality through several versions of a software program. Regression testing, however, is too expensive because it requires many test case executions, and the number of test cases increases sharply as the software evolves. In this paper, we propose the Historical Value-Based Approach, which is based on the use of historical information, to estimate the current cost and fault severity for cost-cognizant test case prioritization. We also conducted a controlled experiment to validate the proposed approach, the results of which proved the proposed approachpsilas usefulness. As a result of the proposed approach, software testers who perform regression testing are able to prioritize their test cases so that their effectiveness can be improved in terms of average percentage of fault detected per cost.

Recent Catastrophic Accidents: Investigating How Software was Responsible

Abstract: Areas crucial to life such as medicine, transportation, nuclear-energy research and industry, aeronautics, and others, all make use of software in one way or another. However, the application of software to such domains means that the software may now become safety-critical such that an error in the software or an error in its use could have devastating consequences. This paper reviews 14 recent accidents, several of which resulted in the loss of life in addition to time and money, and identifies the role(s) that software played as an important causative factor. The useful lessons which can be learned from the accidents are also presented, which can then act as principles and guidelines to avoid the recurrence of similar accidents in the future.

Performance Testing of Mobile Applications at the Unit Test Level

Abstract: With the rapid growth of the wireless market and the development of various mobile devices, innovative methods and technologies to produce high-quality mobile applications and reduce time to market have been emerging. Mobile applications are often characterized by an array of limitations such as the short development lifecycle to gain a competitive advantage and difficulties to update once released. Hence, rigorous testing on the applications is required before distribution to the market, including structural white-box, functional black-box, integration and system testing. Although recently performance testing at the system test level has become crucial given its direct connection with the product quality improvement, most such tests are confined to the areas of load, usability, and stress testing. Moreover, the implementation itself is insufficient due to the limitations of the development environment. This paper proposes a method to support performance testing utilizing a database established through benchmark testing in emulator-based test environment at the unit test level. It also presents the tool that supports the proposed method of performance testing and verifies the reliability of performance test results through experiments.

Automatic Synthesis of Static Fault Trees from System Models

Abstract: Fault tree analysis (FTA) is a traditional reliability analysis technique. In practice, the manual development of fault trees could be costly and error-prone, especially in the case of fault tolerant systems due to the inherent complexities such as various dependencies and interactions among components. Some dynamic fault tree gates, such as Functional Dependency (FDEP) and Priority AND (PAND), are proposed to model the functional and sequential dependencies, respectively. Unfortunately, the potential semantic troubles and limitations of these gates have not been well studied before. In this paper, we describe a framework to automatically generate static fault trees from system models specified with SysML. A reliability configuration model (RCM) and a static fault tree model (SFTM) are proposed to embed system configuration information needed for reliability analysis and error mechanism for fault tree generation, respectively. In the SFTM, the static representations of functional and sequential dependencies with standard Boolean AND and OR gates are proposed, which can avoid the problems of the dynamic FDEP and PAND gates and can reduce the cost of analysis based on a combinatorial model. A fault-tolerant parallel processor (FTTP) example is used to demonstrate our approach.

A Decompositional Approach to Automatic Test Case Generation Based on Formal Specifications

Abstract: Automatic functional testing is a potentially effective technique for software reliability, but it has been a challenge due to the difficulties in automatically deriving adequate test cases and test oracle from informal or semi-formal specifications that are often used in practice. This paper puts forward a new decompositional approach to automatic test case generation on the basis of model-based formal specifications. The approach offers a functional scenario-based test strategy, a set of test case generation criteria, a set of automatic test case generation algorithms, and a well-defined test oracle for automatic test result analysis. A small experiment on the application of the approach is presented, and the result shows that the approach can achieve a higher statement coverage of programs than random testing.