Executive Summary: Da gstuhl Seminar 10111 on Practical Software Testing: Tool Automation and Human Factors March 14-19, 2010
Mark Harman, Henry Muccini, Wolfram Schulte, Tao Xie · 2010
The main goal of the seminar “Practical Software Testing: Tool Automation and Human Factors” was to bring together academics working on algorithms, methods, and techniques for practical software testing, with practitioners, interested in developing more soundly-based and well-understood testing processes and practices. The seminar’s purpose was to make researchers aware of industry’s problems, and practitioners aware of research approaches. The seminar focused in particular on testing automation and human factors: Tool automation. Automation of testing is a crucial concern in industry. It is only with automation that testing becomes practical and scalable to the size of a typical system with which the industry has to deal. Test automation or tool support spans the spectrum from test planning, generation, minimization, execution, oracle checking, to management. Test automation can exploit not only knowledge from the code under test but also from available models or specifications. Human factors. Human factors play important roles in software testing. Given the code under test, tools can try to automate the generation of test inputs as much as possible, but test oracles still need to come from testers, who specify them in the form of specifications, properties, or test assertions, or directly inspect the actual test outputs for correctness. In addition, tools are not always perfect to deal with software complexity; testers need to cooperate with tools to effectively carry out testing tasks, by giving guidance to tools and interpreting results produced by tools. Thus testers need to be well trained.