Automated Functional Testing based on the Navigation of Web Applications

Web applications are becoming more and more complex. Testing such applications is an intricate hard and time-consuming activity. Therefore, testing is often poorly performed or skipped by practitioners. Test automation can help to avoid this situation. Hence, this paper presents a novel approach to perform automated software testing for web applications based on its navigation. On the one hand, web navigation is the process of traversing a web application using a browser. On the other hand, functional requirements are actions that an application must do. Therefore, the evaluation of the correct navigation of web applications results in the assessment of the specified functional requirements. The proposed method to perform the automation is done in four levels: test case generation, test data derivation, test case execution, and test case reporting. This method is driven by three kinds of inputs: i) UML models; ii) Selenium scripts; iii) XML files. We have implemented our approach in an open-source testing framework named Automatic Testing Platform. The validation of this work has been carried out by means of a case study, in which the target is a real invoice management system developed using a model-driven approach.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2011, arXiv:1108.208

Aerated blast furnace slag filters for enhanced nitrogen and phosphorus removal from small wastewater treatment plants

Rock filters (RF) are a promising alternative technology for natural wastewater treatment for upgrading WSP effluent. However, the application of RF in the removal of eutrophic nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, is very limited. Accordingly, the overall objective of this study was to develop a lowcost RF system for the purpose of enhanced nutrient removal from WSP effluents, which would be able to produce effluents which comply with the requirements of the EU Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD) (911271lEEC) and suitable for small communities. Therefore, a combination system comprising a primary facultative pond and an aerated rock filter (ARF) system-either vertically or horizontally loaded-was investigated at the University of Leeds' experimental station at Esholt Wastewater Treatment Works, Bradford, UK. Blast furnace slag (BFS) and limestone were selected for use in the ARF system owing to their high potential for P removal and their low cost. This study involved three major qperiments: (1) a comparison of aerated vertical-flow and horizontal-flow limestone filters for nitrogen removal; (2) a comparison of aerated limestone + blast furnace slag (BFS) filter and aerated BFS filters for nitrogen and phosphorus removal; and (3) a comparison of vertical-flow and horizontal-flow BFS filters for nitrogen and phosphorus removal. The vertical upward-flow ARF system was found to be superior to the horizontal-flow ARF system in terms of nitrogen removal, mostly thiough bacterial nitrification processes in both the aerated limestone and BFS filter studies. The BFS filter medium (whieh is low-cost) showed a much higher potential in removing phosphortls from pond effluent than the limestone medium. As a result, the combination of a vertical upward-flow ARF system and an economical and effective P-removal filter medium, such as BFS, was found to be an ideal optionfor the total nutrient removal of both nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater. In parallel with these experiments, studies on the aerated BFS filter effective life and major in-filter phosphorus removal pathways were carried out. From the standard batch experiments of Pmax adsorption capacity of BFS, as well as six-month data collection of daily average P-removal, it was found that the effective life of the aerated BFS filter was 6.5 years. Scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction spectrometric analyses on the surface of BFS, particulates and sediment samples revealed that the apparent mechanisms of P-removal in the filter are adsorption on the amorphous oxide phase of the BFS surface and precipitation within the filter

Automated analysis of feature models: Quo vadis?

Feature models have been used since the 90's to describe software product lines as a way of reusing common parts in a family of software systems. In 2010, a systematic literature review was published summarizing the advances and settling the basis of the area of Automated Analysis of Feature Models (AAFM). From then on, different studies have applied the AAFM in different domains. In this paper, we provide an overview of the evolution of this field since 2010 by performing a systematic mapping study considering 423 primary sources. We found six different variability facets where the AAFM is being applied that define the tendencies: product configuration and derivation; testing and evolution; reverse engineering; multi-model variability-analysis; variability modelling and variability-intensive systems. We also confirmed that there is a lack of industrial evidence in most of the cases. Finally, we present where and when the papers have been published and who are the authors and institutions that are contributing to the field. We observed that the maturity is proven by the increment in the number of journals published along the years as well as the diversity of conferences and workshops where papers are published. We also suggest some synergies with other areas such as cloud or mobile computing among others that can motivate further research in the future.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-70560-RJunta de Andalucía TIC-186

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research