Testing Process Guidance for Resource Constrained Software Testing

• Authors: Anthony T. Rivers;Mladen A. Vouk
• Venue: ISSRE '99 Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
• Year: 1999

"Classical" operational-profile based testing strategies tend to advocate testing of product functions and operations according to the relative frequencies of their usage in the field. As such these strategies tend to explicitly or implicitly advocate re-execution of previously "covered" elements. This provides a built-in mechanism for letting the testers know that they are doing well through the resulting declining failure intensity.Unfortunately, in modern resource constrained software testing environments, the re-execution of functions that have already been tested is often discourage by business models that operate with limited budget and schedule. Consequently, in Resource Constrained Testing (RCT) environments failure intensity decay is open to interpretation, and may be an impractical guiding and decision tool.We present an approach based on the Testing Efficiency (TE) Metric that, for RCT environments, may be a more appropriate testing decision support aide. We also present supporting results from simulations, experiments and field application of the TE metric..