A Systematic Review on Software Testing Ontologies

Abstract

Undoubtedly, ontologies are a key issue in various areas of Software Engineering (SE), and are widely recognized as a useful approach for representing and managing knowledge. Additionally, one of the SE areas that supports quality assurance is testing. Given that specific methods, processes, and ultimately strategies for software testing involve a large number of specific concepts, it is valuable to have a robust conceptual base, that is, a testing ontology that defines the terms, properties, relationships and axioms explicitly and unambiguously. In order to look for a testing ontology that can be used in a family of testing strategies, in this paper, we investigate, by means of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), primary studies on software testing ontologies. Following an enhanced SLR process of that proposed by Kitchenham, we analyze the resulting twelve documents in the light of a set of research questions and quality criteria.