Test engineer

Abstract: Since manual black-box testing of GUI-based APplications (GAPs) is tedious and laborious, test engineers create test scripts to automate the testing process. These test scripts interact with GAPs by performing actions on their GUI objects. An extra effort that test engineers put in writing test scripts is paid off when these scripts are run repeatedly. Unfortunately, releasing new versions of GAPs with modified GUIs breaks their corresponding test scripts thereby obliterating benefits of test automation. We offer a novel approach for maintaining and evolving test scripts so that they can test new versions of their respective GAPs. We built a tool to implement our approach, and we conducted a case study with forty five professional programmers and test engineers to evaluate this tool. The results show with strong statistical significance that users find more failures and report fewer false positives (p ≪ 0.02) in test scripts with our tool than with a flagship industry product and a baseline manual approach. Our tool is lightweight and it takes less than eight seconds to analyze approximately 1KLOC of test scripts.

Abstract: In software product family engineering reusable artifacts are produced during domain engineering and applications are built from these artifacts during application engineering. Modeling variability of current and future applications is the key for enabling reuse. The proactive reuse leads to a reduction in development costs and a shorter time to market. Up to now, these benefits have been realized for the constructive development phases, but not for testing. This paper presents the ScenTED technique (Scenario based TEst case Derivation), which aims at reducing effort in product family testing. ScenTED is a model-based, reuse-oriented technique for test case derivation in the system test of software product families. Reuse of test cases is ensured by preserving variability during test case derivation. Thus, concepts known from model-based testing in single system engineering, e.g., coverage metrics, must be adapted. Experiences with our technique gained from an industrial case study are discussed and prototypical tool support is illustrated.

Abstract: A test manager software program includes an interactive test graphical-user-interface (GUI) for testing network devices using high-level networking commands. The test GUI allows the test engineer user to enter high-level commands such as Simple Networking Management Protocol (SNMP) commands that read values in a management information database in a network device under test. The high-level commands can be sent from the test manager using a command-line interface (CLI) in a telnet session opened to the network device during testing. The user specifies high-level test, analyze, and restore commands in test cases that are collected into test suites. Rules for logging on to the network device under test are stored that include expected prompts from the network device and user responses such as passwords. Addresses of the network device under test can be re-mapped for testing other devices so the test suites can be reused.