Using ant's alarm pheromone to improve software testing automation

Abstract

Software testing is the de-facto standard for quality control in industry. The complexity of today's applications are becoming so high that our ability to manually test software is diminishing - experts argue that automation is the way forward in the field. Nature-inspired techniques, and in particular the area called swarm intelligence, have got the attention of researchers due to their ability to deal with complexity. In insect societies, and in particular ant colonies, one can find the concept of alarm pheromones used to indicate an important event to the society (e.g. a threat). Alarm pheromones enable the society to have a uniform spread of its individuals, probably as a survival mechanism - the more uniform the spread the better the chances of survival at the colony level. This paper describes a model of the aforementioned ant-behavior and shows how it can be integrated as part of a software testing automation methodology thus demonstrating that software testing can also benefit from nature-inspired approaches. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.