Microservice architectures are an emergent technology that builds business logic into a suite of small services. Each microservice runs in its process and the communication is made through lightweight mechanisms, usually HTTP resource API. These architectures are built upon independently deployable and, supposedly, reliable pieces of software that may, or may not, have been developed by the team using it. Nowadays, industries are dangerously migrating into microservice architectures without an effective and automatic process for testing the software being used. Furthermore, current API specification languages are not expressive enough to be used for testing purposes. To solve this problem it is necessary to extend currently broadly used API specification languages. APOSTL is a specification language to annotate APIs specifications based on first-order logic, with some restrictions. It has the purpose of extending the currently used API description languages with properties that can be useful for testing purposes, transforming these description documents into useful testing artefacts. Besides providing information needed for testing an application, APOSTL also provides an API with semantic. This additional information is then leveraged to automate microservice testing. The work developed in this thesis aims to fully automate the microservice testing process. It is achieved by the implementation of PETIT a tool able to test microservices when provided with an OpenAPI Specification document, written in JSON and properly annotated with the previously proposed specification language, APOSTL. The tool is able to analyze microservices independently from the source code availability.
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 …
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 …
A program fails. Under which circumstances does this failure occur? One single algorithm, the delta debugging algorithm, suffices to determine these failure-inducing circumstances. Delta debugging tests a program systematically and automatically to isolate failure-inducing circumstances such as the program input, changes to the program code, or executed statements.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We propose and demonstrate a method for the reduction of testing effort in safety-critical software development using DO-178 guidance. We achieve this through the application of Bounded Model Checking (BMC) to formal low-level requirements, in order to generate tests automatically that are good enough to replace existing labor-intensive test writing procedures while maintaining independence from implementation artefacts. Given that existing manual processes are often empirical and subjective, we begin by formally defining a metric, which extends recognized best practice from code coverage anal…
A natural and often used strategy when testing software is to use input values at boundaries, i.e. where behavior is expected to change the most, an approach often called boundary value testing or analysis (BVA). Even though this has been a key testing idea for long it has been hard to clearly define and formalize. Consequently, it has also been hard to automate. In this research note we propose one such formalization of BVA by, in a similar way as to how the derivative of a function is defined in mathematics, considering (software) program derivatives. Critical to our definition is the notion…
An Android-based smart Television (TV) must reliably run its applications in an embedded program environment under diverse hardware resource conditions. Owing to the diverse hardware components used to build numerous TV models, TV simulators are usually not high enough in fidelity to simulate various TV models, and thus are only regarded as unreliable alternatives when stress testing such applications. Therefore, even though stress testing on real TV sets is tedious, it is the de facto approach to ensure the reliability of these applications in the industry. In this paper, we study to what ext…
Smart TV application (app) is a new technological software app that can deal with smart TV devices to add more functionality and features. Despite its importance nowadays, far too little attention has been paid to present a systematic approach to test this kind of app so far. In this paper, we present a systematic model-based testing approach for smart TV app. We used our new notion of model separation to use sub-models based on the user preference instead of the exhaustive testing to generate the test cases. Based on the constructed model, we generated a set of test cases to assess the select…
Automated Driving Systems (ADS) have made great achievements in recent years thanks to the efforts from both academia and industry. A typical ADS is composed of multiple modules, including sensing, perception, planning, and control, which brings together the latest advances in different domains. Despite these achievements, safety assurance of ADS is of great significance, since unsafe behavior of ADS can bring catastrophic consequences. Testing has been recognized as an important system validation approach that aims to expose unsafe system behavior; however, in the context of ADS, it is extrem…
Software testing is the process of determining the precision, quality, completeness and security of the software systems. An important step in testing software is the generation of test cases, whose quality plays a vital role in determining the time for testing and subsequently its cost. In this research, it is shown that both structural and behavioural diagrams can be used to represent specifications in a single model using High Level Petri Nets (HLPN). This research focuses on automated generation of test models from Petri nets. Moreover, generating consistent formal models (HLPN) from infor…
One of reasons preventing a wider uptake of model-based testing in the industry is the difficulty which is encountered by developers when trying to think in terms of properties rather than linear specifications. A disparity has traditionally been perceived between the language spoken by customers who specify the system and the language required to construct models of that system. The dynamic nature of the specifications for commercial systems further aggravates this problem in that models would need to be rechecked after every specification change. In this paper, we propose an approach for con…
Unique challenges arise when testing mobile applications due to their prevailing event-driven nature and complex contextual features (e.g. sensors, notifications). Current automated input generation approaches for Android apps are typically not practical for developers to use due to required instrumentation or platform dependence and generally do not effectively exercise contextual features. To better support developers in mobile testing tasks, in this demo we present a novel, automated tool called CrashScope. This tool explores a given Android app using systematic input generation, according …
Enabling fully automated testing of mobile applications has recently become an important topic of study for both researchers and practitioners. A plethora of tools and approaches have been proposed to aid mobile developers both by augmenting manual testing practices and by automating various parts of the testing process. However, current approaches for automated testing fall short in convincing developers about their benefits, leading to a majority of mobile testing being performed manually. With the goal of helping researchers and practitioners - who design approaches supporting mobile testin…
Motivation: Automatically testing changes to code is an essential feature of continuous integration. For open-source code, without licensed dependencies, a variety of continuous integration services exist. The COnstraint-Based Reconstruction and Analysis (COBRA) Toolbox is a suite of open-source code for computational modelling with dependencies on licensed software. A novel automated framework of continuous integration in a semi-licensed environment is required for the development of the COBRA Toolbox and related tools of the COBRA community. Results: ARTENOLIS is a general-purpose infrastruc…
