Generating tests that can reveal performance issues in large and complex software systems within a reasonable amount of time is a challenging task. On one hand, there are numerous combinations of input data values to explore. On the other hand, we have a limited test budget to execute tests. What makes this task even more difficult is the lack of access to source code and the internal details of these systems. In this paper, we present an automated test generation method called ACTA for black-box performance testing. ACTA is based on active learning, which means that it does not require a large set of historical test data to learn about the performance characteristics of the system under test. Instead, it dynamically chooses the tests to execute using uncertainty sampling. ACTA relies on a conditional variant of generative adversarial networks,and facilitates specifying performance requirements in terms of conditions and generating tests that address those conditions.We have evaluated ACTA on a benchmark web application, and the experimental results indicate that this method is comparable with random testing, and two other machine learning methods,i.e. PerfXRL and DN.
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）；IPG Automotive GmbH（IPG汽车有限公司）
Verification and validation are major challenges for developing automated driving systems. A concept that gets more and more recognized for testing in automated driving is scenario-based testing. However, it introduces the problem of what scenarios are relevant for testing and which are not. This work aims to find relevant, interesting, or critical parameter sets within logical scenarios by utilizing Bayes optimization and Gaussian processes. The parameter optimization is done by comparing and evaluating six different metrics in two urban intersection scenarios. Finally, a list of ideas this w…
In this work, we conducted a study on building an automated testing system for deep learning systems based on differential behavior criteria. The automated testing goals were achieved by jointly optimizing two objective functions: maximizing differential behaviors from models under testing and maximizing neuron coverage. By observing differential behaviors from three pre-trained models during each testing iteration, the input image that triggered erroneous feedback was registered as a corner-case. The generated corner-cases can be used to examine the robustness of DNNs and consequently improve…
We present a deep learning system for testing graphics units by detecting novel visual corruptions in videos. Unlike previous work in which manual tagging was required to collect labeled training data, our weak supervision method is fully automatic and needs no human labelling. This is achieved by reproducing driver bugs that increase the probability of generating corruptions, and by making use of ideas and methods from the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) setting. In our experiments, we significantly outperform unsupervised methods such as GAN-based models and discover novel corruptions undet…
OATML, Department of Computer Science（牛津大学计算机科学系OATML）；Department of Statistics, Oxford（牛津大学统计系）
We introduce a new framework for sample-efficient model evaluation that we call active testing. While approaches like active learning reduce the number of labels needed for model training, existing literature largely ignores the cost of labeling test data, typically unrealistically assuming large test sets for model evaluation. This creates a disconnect to real applications, where test labels are important and just as expensive, e.g. for optimizing hyperparameters. Active testing addresses this by carefully selecting the test points to label, ensuring model evaluation is sample-efficient. To t…
Safety is an essential aspect in the facilitation of automated vehicle deployment. Current testing practices are not enough, and going beyond them leads to infeasible testing requirements, such as needing to drive billions of kilometres on public roads. Automated vehicles are exposed to an indefinite number of scenarios. Handling of the most challenging scenarios should be tested, which leads to the question of how such corner cases can be determined. We propose an approach to identify the performance boundary, where these corner cases are located, using Gaussian Process Classification. We als…
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth（马萨诸塞大学达特茅斯分校）
Although there are many automated software testing suites, they usually focus on unit, system, and interface testing. However, especially software updates such as new security features have the potential to diminish user experience. In this paper, we propose a novel automated user experience testing methodology that learns how code changes impact the time unit and system tests take, and extrapolate user experience changes based on this information. Such a tool can be integrated into existing continuous integration pipelines, and it provides software teams immediate user experience feedback. We…
As the complexity and scope of game development increase, playtesting remains an essential activity to ensure the quality of video games. Yet, the manual, ad-hoc nature of playtesting gives space to improvements in the process. In this study, we investigate gaps between academic solutions in the literature for automated video game testing and the needs of video game developers in the industry. We performed a literature review on video game automated testing and applied an online survey with video game developers. The literature results show a rise in research topics related to automated video …
North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）；LexisNexis Legal & Professional（律商联讯法律与专业公司）
Automated UI testing is an important component of the continuous integration process of software development. A modern web-based UI is an amalgam of reports from dozens of microservices written by multiple teams. Queries on a page that opens up another will fail if any of that page's microservices fails. As a result, the overall cost for automated UI testing is high since the UI elements cannot be tested in isolation. For example, the entire automated UI testing suite at LexisNexis takes around 30 hours (3-5 hours on the cloud) to execute, which slows down the continuous integration process. T…
Mobile app development involves a unique set of challenges including device fragmentation and rapidly evolving platforms, making testing a difficult task. The design space for a comprehensive mobile testing strategy includes features, inputs, potential contextual app states, and large combinations of devices and underlying platforms. Therefore, automated testing is an essential activity of the development process. However, current state of the art of automated testing tools for mobile apps poses limitations that has driven a preference for manual testing in practice. As of today, there is no c…
Automated and therefore repeatable tests are important in product lines to ensure and maintain quality of software functions as well as efficiency of the developers. This article shows methods for fully automated testing of SIMULINK models with the slUnit framework and techniques for the integration of slUnit tests in a general test framework to allow integrated and automated test reports.
Computer games are very challenging to handle for traditional automated testing algorithms. In this paper we will look at intelligent agents as a solution. Agents are suitable for testing games, since they are reactive and able to reason about their environment to decide the action they want to take. This paper presents the experience of using an agent-based automated testing framework called \ivxr\ to test computer games. Three games will be discussed, including a sophisticated 3D game called Space Engineers. We will show how the framework can be used in different ways, either directly to dri…
The mass production of complex software has made it impossible to manually test it for security vulnerabilities. Automated security testing tools come in a variety of flavors, function at various stages of software development, and target different categories of software vulnerabilities. It is great that we have a plethora of automated tools to choose from, but it is a problem that their adoption and recognition are not prominent. The purpose of this study is to explore the possibilities of existing techniques while also broadening the horizon by exploring the future of security testing tools …
We present TAO, a software testing tool performing automated test and oracle generation based on a semantic approach. TAO entangles grammar-based test generation with automated semantics evaluation using a denotational semantics framework. We show how TAO can be incorporated with the Selenium automation tool for automated web testing, and how TAO can be further extended to support automated delta debugging, where a failing web test script can be systematically reduced based on grammar-directed strategies. A real-life parking website is adopted throughout the paper to demonstrate the effectivit…
Search Based Software Testing (SBST) is a popular automated testing technique which uses a feedback mechanism to search for faults in software. Despite its popularity, it has fundamental challenges related to the design, construction and interpretation of the feedback. Neural Networks (NN) have been hugely popular in recent years for a wide range of tasks. We believe that they can address many of the issues inherent to common SBST approaches. Unfortunately, NNs require large and representative training datasets. In this work we present an SBST framework based on a deconvolutional generative ne…
To learn how to introduce automated regression testing to existing medium scale Open Source projects, a long-term field experiment was performed with the Open Source project FreeCol. Results indicate that (1) introducing testing is both beneficial for the project and feasible for an outside innovator, (2) testing can enhance communication between developers, (3) signaling is important for engaging the project participants to fill a newly vacant position left by a withdrawal of the innovator. Five prescriptive strategies are extracted for the innovator and two conjectures offered about the abil…
Ensuring the quality of automated driving systems is a major challenge the automotive industry is facing. In this context, quality defines the degree to which an object meets expectations and requirements. Especially, automated vehicles at SAE level 4 and 5 will be expected to operate safely in various contexts and complex situations without misconduct. Thus, a systematic approach is needed to show their safe operation. A way to address this challenge is simulation-based testing as pure physical testing is not feasible. During simulation-based testing, the data used to evaluate the actual qual…
Search-based software testing (SBT) is an effective and efficient approach for testing automated driving systems (ADS). However, testing pipelines for ADS testing are particularly challenging as they involve integrating complex driving simulation platforms and establishing communication protocols and APIs with the desired search algorithm. This complexity prevents a wide adoption of SBT and thorough empirical comparative experiments with different simulators and search approaches. We present OpenSBT, an open-source, modular and extensible framework to facilitate the SBT of ADS. With OpenSBT, i…
To enable automated software testing, the ability to automatically navigate to a state of interest and to explore all, or at least sufficient number of, instances of such a state is fundamental. When testing a computer game the problem has an extra dimension, namely the virtual world where the game is played on. This world often plays a dominant role in constraining which logical states are reachable, and how to reach them. So, any automated testing algorithm for computer games will inevitably need a layer that deals with navigation on a virtual world. Unlike e.g. navigating through the GUI of…
Fuzz Testing is a largely automated testing technique that provides random and unexpected input to a program in attempt to trigger failure conditions. Much of the research conducted thus far into Fuzz Testing has focused on developing improvements to available Fuzz Testing tools and frameworks in order to improve efficiency. In this paper however, we instead look at a way in which we can reduce the amount of developer time required to integrate Fuzz Testing to help maintain an existing codebase. We accomplish this with a new technique for automatically generating Fuzz Targets, the modified ver…
The requirements in automation, digitalization, and fast computations have loaded the IT sector with expectations of highly reliable, efficient, and cost-effective software. Given that the process of testing, verification, and validation of software products consumes 50-75% of the total revenue if the testing process is ineffective, "n" times the expenditure must be invested to mend the havoc caused. A delay in project completion is often attributed to the testing phase because of the numerous cycles of debugging process. The software testing process determines the face of the product released…
Due to the importance of Android app quality assurance, many automated GUI testing tools have been developed. Although the test algorithms have been improved, the impact of GUI rendering has been overlooked. On the one hand, setting a long waiting time to execute events on fully rendered GUIs slows down the testing process. On the other hand, setting a short waiting time will cause the events to execute on partially rendered GUIs, which negatively affects the testing effectiveness. An optimal waiting time should strike a balance between effectiveness and efficiency. We propose AdaT, a lightwei…
Context. Multiple automated techniques have been proposed and developed for mobile application GUI testing aiming to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and practicality. The effectiveness, efficiency, and practicality are 3 fundamental characteristics which testing techniques are built upon, and need to be continuously improved to deliver useful solutions for researchers and practitioners, and community as a whole. Objective. In this systematic review, we attempt to provide a broad picture of existing mobile testing tools by collating and analysing their conceptual, and also performance charac…
The complexity of computer games is ever increasing. In this setup, guiding an automated test algorithm to find a solution to solve a testing task in a game's huge interaction space is very challenging. Having a model of a system to automatically generate test cases would have a strong impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm. However, manually constructing a model turns out to be expensive and time-consuming. In this study, we propose an online agent-based search approach to solve common testing tasks when testing computer games that also constructs a model of the system on…
Modern distributed applications are moving toward a microservice architecture, in which each service is developed and managed independently, and new features and updates are delivered continuously. A guiding principle of microservice architecture is that it must be built to anticipate and mitigate a variety of hardware and software failures. In order to test the fault handling capabilities of microservces, this paper presents IntelliFT, a feedback-based, automated failure testing technique for microservice based applications, which aims to expose the defects in the fault-handling logic quickly…
As the popularity of Smart Televisions (TVs) and interactive Smart TV applications (apps) has recently grown, the usability of these apps has become an important quality characteristic. Previous studies examined Smart TV apps from a usability perspective. However, these methods are mainly manual, and the potential of automated model-based testing methods for usability testing purposes has not yet been fully explored. In this paper, we propose an approach to test the usability of Smart TV apps based on the automated generation of a Smart TV user interaction model from an existing app by a speci…
Research software is often developed by individual researchers or small teams in parallel to their research work. The more people and research projects rely on the software in question, the more important it is that software updates implement new features correctly and do not introduce regressions. Thus, developers of research software must balance their limited resources between implementing new features and thoroughly testing any code changes. We present the processes we use for developing the distributed integration framework RCE at DLR. These processes aim to strike a balance between autom…
JavaScript has become one of the most widely used languages for Web development. However, it is challenging to ensure the correctness and reliability of Web applications written in JavaScript, due to their dynamic and event-driven features. A variety of dynamic analysis techniques for JavaScript Web applications have been proposed, but they are limited in either coverage or scalability. In this paper, we propose a model-based automated approach to achieve high code coverage in a reasonable amount of time via testing with longer event sequences. We implement our approach as the tool LJS, and pe…
The homologation of automated vehicles, being safety-critical complex systems, requires sound evidence for their safe operability. Traditionally, verification and validation activities are guided by a combination of ISO 26262 and ISO/PAS 21448, together with distance-based testing. Starting at SAE Level 3, such approaches become infeasible, resulting in the need for novel methods. Scenario-based testing is regarded as a possible enabler for verification and validation of automated vehicles. Its effectiveness, however, rests on the consistency and substantiality of the arguments used in each st…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Alibaba-NTU Joint Research Institute（阿里巴巴-南洋理工大学联合研究所）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Universidade Federal Fluminense（弗卢米嫩塞联邦大学）
Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) have seen rapid progress in recent years. To ensure the safety and reliability of these systems, extensive testings are being conducted before their future mass deployment. Testing the system on the road is the closest to real-world and desirable approach, but it is incredibly costly. Also, it is infeasible to cover rare corner cases using such real-world testing. Thus, a popular alternative is to evaluate an ADS's performance in some well-designed challenging scenarios, a.k.a. scenario-based testing. High-fidelity simulators have been widely used in this setti…
This short paper presents an architectural overview of an agent-based framework called iv4XR for automated testing that is currently under development by an H2020 project with the same name. The framework's intended main use case of is testing the family of Extended Reality (XR) based systems (e.g. 3D games, VR sytems, AR systems), though the approach can indeed be adapted to target other types of interactive systems. The framework is unique in that it is an agent-based system. Agents are inherently reactive, and therefore are arguably a natural match to deal with interactive systems. Moreover…
Digital twins (DT) of industrial processes have become increasingly important. They aim to digitally represent the physical world to help evaluate, optimize, and predict physical processes and behaviors. Therefore, DT is a vital tool to improve production automation through digitalization and becomes more sophisticated due to rapidly evolving simulation and modeling capabilities, integration of IoT sensors with DT, and high-capacity cloud/edge computing infrastructure. However, the fidelity and reliability of DT software are essential to represent the physical world. This paper shows an automa…
In this paper, we aim at the automated unit coverage-based testing for embedded software. To achieve the goal, by analyzing the industrial requirements and our previous work on automated unit testing tool CAUT, we rebuild a new tool, SmartUnit, to solve the engineering requirements that take place in our partner companies. SmartUnit is a dynamic symbolic execution implementation, which supports statement, branch, boundary value and MC/DC coverage. SmartUnit has been used to test more than one million lines of code in real projects. For confidentiality motives, we select three in-house real pro…
Human-AI Collaboration for Scaling Agile Regression Testing: An Agentic-AI Teammate from Manual to Automated Testing
Institute for Software and Systems Engineering, Technical University of Clausthal（克莱斯塔尔工业大学软件与系统工程研究所）；Hacon Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH – A Siemens Company（Hacon工程公司（西门子旗下））
SmArtSE Research Team（SmArtSE研究团队）；Université du Québec à Chicoutimi（魁北克大学希库蒂米分校）
Industrial robots are important machines applied in numerous modern industries that execute repetitive tasks with high accuracy, replacing or supporting dangerous jobs. In this kind of system, with increased complexity in which cost is related to the time the system keeps working, the system must operate with a minimum number of failures. In other words, a quality aspect important in industry is reliability. We hypothesize that Automated Acceptance Testing improves reliability for industrial robot program. We present the research question, the motivation for this study, our hypothesis and futu…
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) application provide a whole new set of possibilities to drive efficiency of industrial production forward. However, with the higher degree of integration among systems, comes a plethora of newthreats to the latter, as they are not yet designed to be broadly reachable and interoperable. To mitigate these vast amount of new threats, systematic and automated test methods are necessary. This comprehensiveness can be achieved by thorough threat modeling. In order to automate security test, we present an approach to automate the testing process from threat modeli…
Software testing is an important and valuable part of the software development life cycle. Due to time, cost and other circumstances, exhaustive testing is not feasible that's why there is a need to automate the software testing process. Testing effectiveness can be achieved by the State Transition Testing (STT) which is commonly used in real time, embedded and web-based type of software systems. Aim of the current paper is to present an algorithm by applying an ant colony optimization technique, for generation of optimal and minimal test sequences for behavior specification of software. Prese…
Automated GUI testing is widely used to help ensure the quality of mobile apps. However, many GUIs require appropriate text inputs to proceed to the next page which remains a prominent obstacle for testing coverage. Considering the diversity and semantic requirement of valid inputs (e.g., flight departure, movie name), it is challenging to automate the text input generation. Inspired by the fact that the pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) has made outstanding progress in text generation, we propose an approach named QTypist based on LLM for intelligently generating semantic input text acco…
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；University of Gothenburg（哥德堡大学）；RISE Research Institutes of Sweden（瑞典国家研究院）
The technology in the area of automated vehicles is gaining speed and promises many advantages. However, with the recent introduction of conditionally automated driving, we have also seen accidents. Test protocols for both, conditionally automated (e.g., on highways) and automated vehicles do not exist yet and leave researchers and practitioners with different challenges. For instance, current test procedures do not suffice for fully automated vehicles, which are supposed to be completely in charge for the driving task and have no driver as a back up. This paper presents current challenges of …
Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is a well-known technique, but the industrial experience is needed to determine its effectiveness in different application domains. We present a case study introducing a unified framework for generating, executing and verifying CIT test suites, based on the open-source Avocado test framework. In addition, we present a new industrial case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. This evaluation showed that the new framework can generate, execute, and verify effective combinatorial interaction test suites for detecting configuration failure…
Web applications are becoming more and more complex. Testing such applications is an intricate hard and time-consuming activity. Therefore, testing is often poorly performed or skipped by practitioners. Test automation can help to avoid this situation. Hence, this paper presents a novel approach to perform automated software testing for web applications based on its navigation. On the one hand, web navigation is the process of traversing a web application using a browser. On the other hand, functional requirements are actions that an application must do. Therefore, the evaluation of the correc…
Virtual testing of automated driving systems (ADS) has become an essential part of testing procedures for all automation levels. As ADS from automation level 3 and up are very complex, virtual testing for such systems is inevitable. The complexity of these levels lies in the modelling and calculation demand for the virtual environment which consists of roads, traffic, static and dynamic objects as well as the modelling of the car itself. For safety and performance analyses of ADS, the most important part is the modelling and consideration of road traffic participants. There is multiple traffic…
Today, there are millions of third-party Android applications. Some of these applications are buggy or even malicious. To identify such applications, novel frameworks for automated black-box testing and dynamic analysis are being developed by the Android community, including Google. Code coverage is one of the most common metrics for evaluating effectiveness of these frameworks. Furthermore, code coverage is used as a fitness function for guiding evolutionary and fuzzy testing techniques. However, there are no reliable tools for measuring fine-grained code coverage in black-box Android app tes…
Context: Verification and validation (V&V) activities make up 20 to 50 percent of the total development costs of a software system in practice. Test automation is proposed to lower these V&V costs but available research only provides limited empirical data from industrial practice about the maintenance costs of automated tests and what factors affect these costs. In particular, these costs and factors are unknown for automated GUI-based testing. Objective: This paper addresses this lack of knowledge through analysis of the costs and factors associated with the maintenance of automated GUI-base…
