want do research on software testing

Question

hi dudes, i am very interested in research software testing, would you please suggest how and which topics in software testing to do research and also provide research papers on software testing.

Answer 1

You might want to take a look at Google's Testing Blog.

Answer 2

There is a whole set of testing training material, including papers and videos here: http://www.testingeducation.org/BBST/

There are also a large number of research papers here: kaner.com/?page_id=7

Answer 3

The Program Analysis Group at MIT has a number of papers on testing. This page from NCSU lists at least a hundred folks interested in testing, including the link above.

Even with 100+ researchers it seems to be an underrated topic of study for academics. Industry isn't quite so bad but you'll need to find the right folks.

Answer 4

The most innovative thing I've seen is Evolutionary Testing.

Basically it's about automated test that has genetic algorithms to modify the input parameters so it tries to find corner cases that, otherwise, would be very hard to find.

It is a good practice to test algorithms with many variables and a larga variability in the accepted values. The example I saw was a test for a mathematical algorithm used to park a car automatically with inputs such as: - parking spot length - parking spot width - front car width + separation from curb - rear car width + separation from curb - Position of your car (x,y) and reference distances to other cars

They then defined a performance function to determine how close to a collision the algorithm went with an initial set of parameters. The closest to the collision you get, the more interesting it is to test this set of parameters, so they evolve from here and iterate again.

They managed (according to the presentation) to find a particular set of conditions that caused a collision. This is what was considered a bug for this algorithm.

They then had to fix the parking algorithm.

Evolutionary testing seems promising, but what it still has to demonstrate is if there are any way to use this approach to testing to more traditional applications.

See here for more info: http://evotest.iti.upv.es/