Advanced Topics in Software Engineering - Software testing

Teacher:

• Andrea Polini

Lessons schedule:

• Wednesday, 11am-1pm, room AB1
• Thursday, 4pm-6pm, room AB1

Office Hours :

• Thursday 12pm - 1pm (better if you announce yourself via e-mail)

The course intends to provide to the students the basic knowledge and competences for testing complex software systems. The following topics will be covered:

• Software Testing generalities
• Software Testing phases
• Test derivation strategies
• Test adequacy assessment

The various conceptual aspects will be illustrated using examples and competences will be assessed with a course project that will require the usage of professional tools.

• General Information [AM - Ch.1]
  • Basic of software testing
  • Software quality dimensions
  • Testing and other verification activities
  • Type of testing
• Test Generation Strategies from Requirements [AM - Ch.3]
  • Equivalence partitioning
  • Boundary analysis
  • The Category Partition method
  • Cause-Effect graphs
  • Test generation from predicates
    • BOR,BRO, BRE adequate test sets
• Test Generation from Finite-State Models [AM - Ch.4]
  • Finite State Machines (FSM)
  • Conformance testing
  • The W-Method
  • The partial W-Method
• Test Generation from Combinatorial Design [AM - Ch.5]
• Test Adequacy Assessment Using Control Flow and Data Flow [AM - Ch.7]
  • Control-Flow criteria
  • Data-Flow criteria
• Unit and Integration Testing [AM - Ch.10-11]

Course Slides

• Course Introduction - March 22nd
• Testing generalities - March 29th
• Domain Partitioning - March 30th, April 5th
• Predicate Analysis - April 6th, 13th, 19th
• Test generation for Finite State Models - April 20th, May 3rd, 4th, 17th
• Combinatorial Design - May 17th, 24th, 31st, June 1st
• Test Adequacy - June 1st, 7th, 8th
• Testing Phases - June 21st
• Paper Assignment - May 11th

• Papers discussion - July 5th, 6th
• Exercises - June 22nd

Textbooks

• [AM] Aditya P. Mathur, Foundations of Software Testing, 2nd Edition, Pearson 2014

Exam Dates A.Y. 2016/2017

• July 11th and 26th, 2017 - 11am-1pm, room AB1
• September 13th and 27th, 2017 - 11am-1pm, room AB1
• February 14th and 28th, 2018 - 11am-1pm, room AB1

Exam rules:

The exam consist of three papers:

• 1st. The student should perform a short survey presentation. One or two scientific papers will be assigned to each student. A short survey on the topic will be performed, and a presentation will be given by the student in one of the last lessons.
• 2nd. A Small Software Project should be realized by students (it is possible to work in groups of 2) that will have to choose an open source software system (or possibly one made by them), and provide a complete test plan with artifacts. A short report have to be delivered before the oral paper. Alternatively students can decide to perform a written paper on the date fixed for the exam as reported on the students carreer system (ESSE3).
• 3rd. Finally the exam foresees an oral paper that can be performed after having passed the previous two papers. The date will be communicated by the teacher.

For each paper the student gets a mark in the range 6 and 12. The final mark results from the sum of the marks the student gets on each paper.

Papers Assignment

At this page you can find the list of papers presented during May 11th lesson

Results

• N/A