2021/02/28 by Matteo Brunetto, Brunetto, Matteo, Giovanni Denaro +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Software Engineering Techniques and Practices #Software Reliability and Analysis Research #Software System Performance and Reliability #Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.00465
openalex publication_date 2021/02/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The level and quality of automation dramatically affects software testing\nactivities, determines costs and effectiveness of the testing process, and\nlargely impacts on the quality of the final product. While costs and benefits\nof automating many testing activities in industrial practice (including\nmanaging the quality process, executing large test suites, and managing\nregression test suites) are well understood and documented, the benefits and\nobstacles of automatically generating system test suites in industrial practice\nare not well reported yet, despite the recent progresses of automated test case\ngeneration tools. Proprietary tools for automatically generating test cases are\nbecoming common practice in large software organisations, and commercial tools\nare becoming available for some application domains and testing levels.\nHowever, generating system test cases in small and medium-size software\ncompanies is still largely a manual, inefficient and ad-hoc activity. This\npaper reports our experience in introducing techniques for automatically\ngenerating system test suites in a medium-size company. We describe the\ntechnical and organisational obstacles that we faced when introducing automatic\ntest case generation in the development process of the company, and present the\nsolutions that we successfully experienced in that context. In particular, the\npaper discusses the problems of automating the generation of test cases by\nreferring to a customised ERP application that the medium-size company\ndeveloped for a third party multinational company, and presents ABT2.0, the\ntest case generator that we developed by tailoring ABT, a research\nstate-of-the-art GUI test generator, to their industrial environment. This\npaper presents the new features of ABT2.0, and discusses how these new features\naddress the issues that we faced.\n