Products Lines of Test Generation, Selection, Prioritization and Processing Tools

Test is the main activitity used by industry to ensure software quality. Because of this, companies has invested more time and effort in this task. It is estimated that between 30 and 90% of total cost to develop a software is assigned to tests. This project, from INES (Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia para Engenharia de Software), aims to develop techniques and tools to become tests activities more efficient and effective.

Our goal is to investigate the following activities:

• Tests generation - it makes tests from another artifact (typically requirements or source code);
• Tests selection - it defines from a test suite a subset of the most relevant tests in accordance with certain criteria of importance;
• Tests priorization - it defines the execution order of the tests based on some criterion of optimization;
• Processing tests - it is the analysis of the tests (and other artifacts such as requirements) written in natural language. The objective is to extract information to help the generation, selection and prioritization of tests.

We have experience in research and development in all test activities mentioned. Many of our previous projects involved conception and construction of tools to generation, selection, priorization and processing tests. In this project we will develop tools like a product line. The tools will be built on a open source framework that enables new product can be linked and created.

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