Home Contact

CMSC737: Fundamentals of Software Testing (Fall 2012)

Dept. of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.

SCHEDULE

Date Topic Readings Comments
Aug 30 Introduction to the course Class webpage Sign up for the class forum
Sep 4 The need for testing; testing as an integral part of software engineering; software engineering processes and testing.
  • Testing: a roadmap, Mary Jean Harrold, Proceedings of the conference on the future of Software engineering May 2000.
  • Testing: principles and practice, Stephen R. Schach, ACM Computing Surveys, (CSUR) March 1996, Volume 28 Issue 1.
Sep 6 Understanding and Partitioning Input spaces Open discussion in class. Notes on whiteboard.
The category-partition method for specifying and generating functional tests, T. J. Ostrand, M. J. Balcer, Communications of the ACM June 1988, Volume 31 Issue 6.
Sep 11 Project Discussion. GUITAR Homepage
Sep 13 Code instrumentation, coverage GUITAR Homepage
Sep 18 The relationship between sampling and testing – an Introduction A test generation strategy for pair-wise testing, Kuo-Chung Tai; Yu Lei, Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, Volume: 28 Issue: 1, Jan. 2002, Page(s): 109 -111.
Sep 20 Dataflow coverage
Sep 25 On experimentation and evaluation of testing techniques. Context: regression testing. An empirical study of regression test selection techniques, Todd L. Graves, Mary Jean Harrold, Jung-Min Kim, Adam Porter, Gregg Rothermel, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) April 2001, Volume 10 Issue 2.
Sep 27 The role of experimentation in testing – an Introduction Xun Yuan, Atif M. Memon, "Generating Event Sequence-Based Test Cases Using GUI Runtime State Feedback," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 81-95, Jan./Feb. 2010
Oct 2,4 Test Adequacy and Coverage Criteria
  • Software unit test coverage and adequacy Hong Zhu, Patrick A. V. Hall, John H. R. May ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) December 1997 Volume 29 Issue 4.
  • Coverage criteria for GUI testing Atif M. Memon, Mary Lou Soffa, Martha E. Pollack ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Proceedings of the 8th European software engineering conference held jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering September 2001 Volume 26 Issue 5.
  • Xun Yuan, Myra B. Cohen, Atif M. Memon, "GUI Interaction Testing: Incorporating Event Context," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 559-574, July/Aug. 2011.
  • The evaluation of program-based software test data adequacy criteria E. J. Weyuker Communications of the ACM June 1988 Volume 31 Issue 6.
Slides
Oct 9 Test Oracles “Designing and comparing automated test oracles for GUI-based software applications” by Qing Xie and Atif M. Memon. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, vol. 16, no. 1, 2007, ACM Press.
Oct 11 Test Oracles On Testing Non-Testable Programs, Elaine J. Weyuker, The Computer Journal (1982) 25 (4): 465-470.
Oct 16 Designing an experiment to compare test adequacy criteria Scott McMaster and Atif Memon. 2008. Call-Stack Coverage for GUI Test Suite Reduction. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 34, 1 (January 2008), 99-115.
Oct 18 Fundamental concepts: bottom-up, top-down, mocks, fakes, stubs, drivers. Testing for performance, robustness, usability, correctness
Oct 23 Predicate-based test generation Predicate-based test generation for computer programs, Kuo-Chung Tai, Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Software Engineering, 1993. Page(s): 267-276.
Oct 25 Build testing. Testing component hierarchies. Multi-configuration systems. Shared component-based systems. Continuous testing. “Effective and Scalable Software Compatibility Testing” by Il-Chul Yoon, Alan Sussman. Atif M. Memon, and Adam Porter, in ISSTA '08: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
Oct 30 Defects and Testing “Accounting for Defect Characteristics in Evaluations of Testing Techniques” by Jaymie Strecker and Atif M. Memon. ACM Trans. on Softw. Eng. and Method., vol. 21, no. 3, 2012, ACM.
Nov 1 MIDTERM EXAM Everything discussed in class including lecture on Nov. 1. Open notes/book. No computers.
Nov 6 Issues in Regression testing.
  • Jung-Min Kim, Adam Porter, and Gregg Rothermel. 2000. An empirical study of regression test application frequency. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering (ICSE '00). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 126-135.
  • Atif M. Memon. 2008. Automatically repairing event sequence-based GUI test suites for regression testing. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 18, 2, Article 4 (November 2008), 36 pages.
Nov 8 Test prioritization Gregg Rothermel, Roland J. Untch, and Chengyun Chu. 2001. Prioritizing Test Cases For Regression Testing. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 27, 10 (October 2001), 929-948.
Nov 13 Student Presentations by: Arellano, Ayhan, Franklin 25 mins each. Topics/papers will be posted by presenter on class forum. See this thread.
Nov 15 Student Presentations by: Knutson, Sharmin 35 mins each. Topics/papers will be posted by presenter on class forum.See this thread.
Nov 20 Student Presentations by: Tran, Venkatesan 35 mins each. Topics/papers will be posted by presenter on class forum.See this thread.
Nov 22 THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY
Nov 27 Case Studies by: Arellano, Ayhan, Franklin
Nov 29 Case Studies by: Knutson, Sharmin
Dec 4 Case Studies by: Tran, Venkatesan
Dec 6 FINAL EXAM