Wan M. N. Wan Kadir

A Comparative Study on Automated Software Test Oracle Methods

Software testing has been used to find software faults in order to improve its quality. To verify the software behavior, testers require test oracle. Test oracle is a reliable source of expected software behavior that provides outputs for any input specified in the software specifications and a comparator to verify actual results. While test automation requires automated oracle support, oracle automation is considered as a challenging task. These challenges are from the automation required in expected output generation and results verification. This paper presents oracle activities and the challenges to prepare automated oracle. Then a comparative study of existing automated oracle and expected output generation methods is provided. Finally, a classification of these methods is suggested based on how these methods provide automated test oracle and the tool they used. The classification explains which oracle activities will be automated by the proposed approaches.

BROOD: Business Rules-Driven Object Oriented Design

A critical success factor for information systems is their ability to evolve as their environment changes. There is compelling evidence that the management of change in business policy can have a profound effect on an information system’s ability to evolve effectively and efficiently. For this to be successful, there is a need to represent business rules from the early requirements stage, expressed in user-understandable terms, to downstream system design components and maintain these throughout the lifecycle of the system. Any user-oriented changes could then be traced and if necessary propagated from requirements to design specifications and evaluated by both end-users and developers about their impact on the system. The BROOD approach, discussed in this article, aims to provide seamless traceability between requirements and system designs through the modelling of business rules and the successive transformations, using UML as the modelling framework.

An Evaluation of Traceability Approaches to Support Software Evolution

Requirements traceability is becoming increasingly significant element in software engineering. It provides critical function in the development and maintenance of a software system. From the software evolution point of view, requirements traceability plays an important role in facilitating software evolution. Since the evolution is inevitable, a traceability approach must take as much as possible the important influencing aspects into account to the evolution processes in order to minimize the evolution efforts. This paper evaluates several recent traceability approaches published in literature with the focus on their contributions to software evolution. The evaluation results may be used as a basis for improving requirements traceability approaches that may simplify the software evolution tasks.

An automated framework for software test oracle

Context: One of the important issues of software testing is to provide an automated test oracle. Test oracles are reliable sources of how the software under test must operate. In particular, they are used to evaluate the actual results that produced by the software. However, in order to generate an automated test oracle, oracle challenges need to be addressed. These challenges are output-domain generation, input domain to output domain mapping, and a comparator to decide on the accuracy of the actual outputs. Objective: This paper proposes an automated test oracle framework to address all of these challenges. Method: I/O Relationship Analysis is used to generate the output domain automatically and Multi-Networks Oracles based on artificial neural networks are introduced to handle the second challenge. The last challenge is addressed using an automated comparator that adjusts the oracle precision by defining the comparison tolerance. The proposed approach was evaluated using an industry strength case study, which was injected with some faults. The quality of the proposed oracle was measured by assessing its accuracy, precision, misclassification error and practicality. Mutation testing was considered to provide the evaluation framework by implementing two different versions of the case study: a Golden Version and a Mutated Version. Furthermore, a comparative study between the existing automated oracles and the proposed one is provided based on which challenges they can automate. Results: Results indicate that the proposed approach automated the oracle generation process 97% in this experiment. Accuracy of the proposed oracle was up to 98.26%, and the oracle detected up to 97.7% of the injected faults. Conclusion: Consequently, the results of the study highlight the practicality of the proposed oracle in addition to the automation it offers.

A Comparative Evaluation of State-of-the-Art Approaches for Web Service Composition

In todays Web environment, many enterprises decide to implement and publish their applications on the Internet using Web services technology. In many cases, a single service is not sufficient to fulfill the users request. To solve this problem, services should be combined together. Therefore, composition of Web services is one of the recent critical issues. A number of approaches have been presented, to tackle this problem. In this paper, we categorize these approaches into four categories (workflow-based, AI-planning based, syntactic-based, and semantic-based). Then, we compare these approaches based on some criteria (like QoS, scalability, and correctness). Investigation of that classification will help researchers who are working on service composition to deliver more applicable solutions.

Semantic Web Service Discovery and Composition Based on AI Planning and Web Service Modeling Ontology

Web services are the preferred standards-based way to realize service oriented architecture (SOA) computing. A problem that has become one of the recent critical issues is automated composition of Web services. A number of approaches have been proposed to resolve the problem. However, discovery and composition of Web services have been neglected by majority of those approaches. In this paper, we propose an approach called AIMO, based on AI-planning and Web service modeling ontology (WSMO), which are adapted and extended to tackle the mentioned problem. Moreover, we propose a translator to provide interaction between WSMO and AI-planning. We start with presenting the AIMO architecture which shows all components of the proposed approach. Finally, a simple case study is designed to test some components of AIMO. The preliminary results of the test demonstrate that our approach provides an applicable solution.

Security conscious ai-planning based composition of semantic web services

Purpose – Automated composition of semantic web services has become one of the recent critical issues in todays web environment. Despite the importance of artificial intelligence (AI)‐planning techniques for web service composition, previous works in that area do not address security issues, which is the focus of this paper. The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach to achieve security conscious composition of semantic web services.Design/methodology/approach – The proposed approach called security conscious composition of semantic web services (SCAIMO) is based on the prior work, i.e. AIMO. The AIMO is an effective approach for web service discovery and composition based on AI‐planning, web service modeling ontology (WSMO), and description logic (DL). In this paper, definitions of secure matchmaking and web service composition are formalized based on DLs. Moreover, security capabilities and constraint types in the proposed SCAIMO framework are presented.Findings – This paper proposes a secure ...

Propagating Requirement Change into Software High Level Designs towards Resilient Software Evolution

Uncertain and incomplete requirements throughout the whole software life cycle contribute to volatility of the requirements. In a situation where the volatile requirement is changed to satisfy stakeholder needs, all the affected requirements and other impacted software artefacts (such as designs, codes, and tests) must be identified and changed accordingly. This paper introduces an approach to facilitate both engineers and users in propagating changes from requirements to the software high-level designs during software development and evolution. The two main pillars of this approach, namely product metamodel and process model are described in details. Firstly, the metamodel highlights on explicit conceptual model for volatile requirement and its characteristics. Next, the focus will be placed on the systematic process model specified using the SPEM that offers guidelines to perform the requirement change process. The applicability of the product metamodel and its elements are evaluated using the IFAMMS case study application.

Comparative analysis on adaptive features for RFID middleware

Middleware is software that connects between hardware and application layer. Traditional middleware is limited in its ability to support adaptation while adaptive middleware enables modifying its behavior to conform to new situation. RFID applications grow widely and are used in many purposes such as supply chain management and ubiquitous computing enabled by pervasive, low cost sensing and identification. Implementing adaptive characteristic in RFID middleware will increase the capability of adaptation to specific environment such as different reader/tag, different application, and different platform. Adaptive middleware enables modifying the behavior of a distributed application after the application is developed in response to some changes in functional requirements or operating conditions. An extensive study has been carried out, and comparative analysis has been done on identifying the standard features that reflect the functionalities of RFID middleware and adaptive features that represent the non-functionalities of RFID middleware address to overcome the specific problems of application systems. This paper discusses the outcome of this study and adaptive middleware architecture for RFID applications is proposed that supports multi readers and multi applications.

An automated oracle approach to test decision-making structures

Decision-making structures are important building blocks in most of the software; however, it may be difficult to verify them because there are various input conditions and several paths causing them to behave differently. Test oracles are reliable sources of how the software must operate. The aim of the present paper is to study the applications of Artificial Neural Networks as an automated oracle to test decision-making structures. First, the decision rules were modeled by the neural network using a training dataset generated based on the software specifications and domain expert knowledge. Next, after the neural network was applied to test a subject-registration application, the proposed approach was evaluated using mutation testing. The accuracy of the resulted oracle is discussed as well.