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Séminaire du 25 février 2005
Conférencier:
Alan Williams, SITE, University of Ottawa
Titre :
Interaction Testing with Covering Arrays
Heure
13h30
Lieu
PK-5115, Pavillon Président-Kennedy
(Station metro Place-Des-Arts, 5ième étage)
Résumé
Many software applications make use of components and facilities such as Internet browsers, operating systems, data bases, etc. When a system relies on such components, the application may have to deal with different brands and versions of the various components.
For example, an internet browser could be Netscape or Explorer, and then within the particular brands of browsers, there are numerous versions of each. This is just one component of many that could be contained in a system. The selection of the specific version of each component is assumed
to be independent of other components.
If an application uses any components, and there are many types of each component, there are a potentially large number of system configurations on which the application is expected to run. This leads to a problem for system testing: out of the many possible configurations, there are normally
resources available to select only a few configurations for testing. If we cannot test all configurations, which ones should be selected to obtain the best test coverage?
In this type of testing, the goal is to re-run a test suite for the application on different configurations to ensure that the application's functionality works well on all platforms.
Often components function well in isolation, but when two or more of them interact, problems often occur. In this talk, I will discuss a strategy based on covering arrays for choosing a set of configurations that will maximize coverage of potential interactions among system components, with a
small subset of all possible configurations.
Biographie :
Alan Williams is currently an assistant professor in the School of Information Technology and Engineering, at the University of Ottawa. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Ottawa in 2002. He also has B.Math and M.Math degrees from the University of Waterloo, received in 1985
and 1988. For over 6 years, Alan was a Member of Scientific Staff at Bell-Northern Research (now part of Nortel Networks) in Ottawa, where he was involved with telecommunications feature testing, regression testing, test strategy development, and test tool design and testing. Alan's general
interests are software testing and software engineering; specific interests are in testing from state-machine based specifications, and testing software deployed to multiple system configurations. Alan is also a previous winner (2002) and second-place finisher (2003) at the SDL forum society's SDL design contest.