Objective re-weighting to guide an interactive search based software testing system
Paper in proceeding, 2013

Even hardware-focused industries today develop products where software is both a large and important component. Engineers tasked with developing and integrating these products do not always have a software engineering background. To ensure quality, tools are needed that automate and support software testing while allowing these domain specialists to leverage their knowledge and experience. Search-based testing could be a key aspect in creating an automated tool for supporting testing activities. However, domain specific quality criteria and trade-offs make it difficult to develop a general fitness function a priori, so interaction between domain specialists and such a tool would be critical to its success. In this paper we present a system for interactive search based software testing and investigate a way for domain specialists to guide the search by dynamically re-weighting quality goals. Our empirical investigation shows that objective reweighing can help a human domain specialist interactively guide the search, without requiring specialised knowledge of the system and without sacrificing population diversity.

embedded software

industrial experience

interactive search based software engineering

user centered

search based software testing

Author

Bogdan Marculescu

Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, BTH

Robert Feldt

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Richard Torkar

University of Gothenburg

2013 12th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, ICMLA 2013; Miami, FL; United States; 4 December 2013 through 7 December 2013

Vol. 2 102-107

Subject Categories

Software Engineering

DOI

10.1109/ICMLA.2013.113

More information

Latest update

4/6/2018 1