An Evolution-Centric Perspective on Software Testing Seminars/Workshops

Abstract

Useful software evolves: it is corrected, enhanced, and adapted to new platforms, resulting in new releases of systems. To validate these new releases, software engineers "regression test" them. Such regression testing is important for software quality, but it is also expensive, and in fact, often dominates overall software costs. This motivates an evolution-centric perspective on software testing, where emphasis is placed on regression testing. In this talk I describe research following this perspective. I first describe one particular approach to regression testing using regression test selection techniques (which reduce regression testing costs by selecting subsets of existing test suites for reexecution), present techniques for performing regression test selection, and describe empirical results obtained in studying those techniques. I then show how the evolution-centric perspective can be usefully extended beyond regression testing to other verification techniques.