AGEDIS - Innovative Aspects of the Project

AGEDIS will advance the state of the art in software testing, moving the industry towards greater automation of the testing process and higher quality software through the introduction of:

Software modelling for automatic test generation, execution, and verification. The use of model driven test generation is in its infancy and there are no existing tools that integrate test generation with execution and verification.

Implementing a test case as a software component (JavaBean). This is a novel way to improve the maintenance of test suites and facilitate the incremental development of re-usable testware.

Integration between test generation and test execution in a distributed and non-deterministic environment. No currently available tools are able to deal, in an efficient manner, with test execution in a dynamic, non-deterministic distributed environment. All available automation technologies assume the total predictability of the unit under test in order to verify that a test case has completed successfully.

Feedback from test execution to further test generation. The use of coverage analysis and error analysis to enhance the quality of a test suite is a well-documented technique, but there are no tools to automate the process. Moreover, the use of coverage feedback is more of a theoretical rather than an accepted testing practice. AGEDIS will provide a fully automated feedback path from test execution results to test generation engine - thus enabling this testing practice to be used in practical situations with more efficiency.

Use of exhaustive model traversal and partial search techniques for test generation. Exhaustive model traversal is only an option if the number of states is not too large. There are numerous heuristics for partial search of a finite state machine, and various techniques to guarantee their effectiveness. AGEDIS will research the most effective test generation heuristics in the area of distributed software models. There are likely to be specific techniques for distributed software that are more appropriate than the generic techniques appearing in research publications. The consortium will also pioneer new techniques in this area based on the previous research and technological expertise of the partners.

Visual reporting of test results using a test suite browser. Visual presentation of data is a proven technique for improved productivity. Commercially available testing tools do not provide visualization of test suites as a whole in conjunction with their coverage statistics.

An open architecture that supports standardized and public data exchange specifications between all major components, to encourage broad acceptance and exploitation of the tool set by the general testing community and test tool developers.

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