State-of-the-Art Software Testing -- Diomidis Spinellis

notes.md

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8048644

Motivation

• rising code base size and complexity
• requirements for development spped and agility
• distributed teams

Techniques

Unit testing

• write tests for routines

Test-driven development

• keeps tight focus on requirements
• helps with testable design
• better test coverage

Test pyramid

• lost of unit tests
• "selective doce of component and integration tests", e.g. REST service calls
• A few end-to-end tests

Continuous Integration

• run tests after each commit

Test coverage analysis

• what code and percentage is covered by the automated tests
• low/decreasing levels are warning signs
• examine test effectiveness
• measure runtime
• measure brittleness

A/B testing

• feature only released to a sub-set of users
• compare the behavior of different groups
• use feature toggles
• easy way to measure outcome: detailed server logs with user interactions

Tips

Reduce boilerplate

• e.g. with projects like Lombok

Reduce test smells

• tools for intelligent selection of test cases to run => reduce test execution time
• flag and correct brittle tests
• have a stable staging environment