Observations on software testing and its optimization

Abstract

Although there are a lot of researches on software testing, most of the works are on individual testing approaches. There is no much work on the general understanding/discussion at higher level. Based on a few years' industrial experience, we reviewed some research fields of software testing, provided discussion on the issues that have emerged but not clearly represented in previous literature, and tried to establish a philosophical viewpoint of understanding software testing. By having listed some characteristics of modern software testing that have been commonly noticed though not fully studied, we pointed out that software testing is intrinsically dynamic and by nature a representative problem of multi-objective optimization. The test cases should be evolved along with the change of software. We also thought coding and testing should accommodate each other and especially coding strategy should be well chosen in favor of easy testing. A few research directions have also been pointed out. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.