A formal verification framework and associated tools for enterprise modeling : application to UEML

The aim of this paper is to propose and apply a verification and validation approach to Enterprise Modeling that enables the user to improve the relevance and correctness, the suitability and coherence of a model by using properties specification and formal proof of properties

SOFTWARE TESTING TECHNIQUES FOR THE INFORMATION SYSTEMS PROFESSIONAL: A CURRICULUM PERSPECTIVE

A sound information systems (IS) curriculum should equip its students with both technical and organizational skills in communications (both oral and written), analysis, design, programming, testing, documentation, and management because most of the entry-level jobs opened for college IS graduates require these skills. A review of the current IS curriculum models reveals that specific pedagogical guidelines are available for most of these skills except software testing. Software testing is an important part the of IS development process. To achieve effectiveness in software testing, the participating IS professionals must apply software testing techniques. This paper discusses the importance of software testing to IS development and maintenance, reviews the existing software testing techniques, and provides a pedagogical guideline for instructing software testing techniques in IS curricula

Automated Web Applications Testing

Unit tests are a vital part of several software development practices and processes such as Test-First Programming, Extreme Programming and Test-Driven Development. This article shortly presents the software quality and testing concepts as well as an introduction to an automated unit testing framework for PHP web based applicationssoftware quality, continuous integration, unit testing

Why and How to Extract Conditional Statements From Natural Language Requirements

Functional requirements often describe system behavior by relating events to each other, e.g. "If the system detects an error (e_1), an error message shall be shown (e_2)". Such conditionals consist of two parts: the antecedent (see e_1) and the consequent (e_2), which convey strong, semantic information about the intended behavior of a system. Automatically extracting conditionals from texts enables several analytical disciplines and is already used for information retrieval and question answering. We found that automated conditional extraction can also provide added value to Requirements Engineering (RE) by facilitating the automatic derivation of acceptance tests from requirements. However, the potential of extracting conditionals has not yet been leveraged for RE. We are convinced that this has two principal reasons: 1) The extent, form, and complexity of conditional statements in RE artifacts is not well understood. We do not know how conditionals are formulated and logically interpreted by RE practitioners. This hinders the development of suitable approaches for extracting conditionals from RE artifacts. 2) Existing methods fail to extract conditionals from Unrestricted Natural Language (NL) in fine-grained form. That is, they do not consider the combinatorics between antecedents and consequents. They also do not allow to split them into more fine-granular text fragments (e.g., variable and condition), rendering the extracted conditionals unsuitable for RE downstream tasks such as test case derivation. This thesis contributes to both areas. In Part I, we present empirical results on the prevalence and logical interpretation of conditionals in RE artifacts. Our case study corroborates that conditionals are widely used in both traditional and agile requirements such as acceptance criteria. We found that conditionals in requirements mainly occur in explicit, marked form and may include up to three antecedents and two consequents. Hence, the extraction approach needs to understand conjunctions, disjunctions, and negations to fully capture the relation between antecedents and consequents. We also found that conditionals are a source of ambiguity and there is not just one way to interpret them formally. This affects any automated analysis that builds upon formalized requirements (e.g., inconsistency checking) and may also influence guidelines for writing requirements. Part II presents our tool-supported approach CiRA capable of detecting conditionals in NL requirements and extracting them in fine-grained form. For the detection, CiRA uses syntactically enriched BERT embeddings combined with a softmax classifier and outperforms existing methods (macro-F_1: 82%). Our experiments show that a sigmoid classifier built on RoBERTa embeddings is best suited to extract conditionals in fine-grained form (macro-F_1: 86%). We disclose our code, data sets, and trained models to facilitate replication. CiRA is available at http://www.cira.bth.se/demo/. In Part III, we highlight how the extraction of conditionals from requirements can help to create acceptance tests automatically. First, we motivate this use case in an empirical study and demonstrate that the lack of adequate acceptance tests is one of the major problems in agile testing. Second, we show how extracted conditionals can be mapped to a Cause-Effect-Graph from which test cases can be derived automatically. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach in a case study with three industry partners. In our study, out of 578 manually created test cases, 71.8% can be generated automatically. Furthermore, our approach discovered 80 relevant test cases that were missed in manual test case design. At the end of this thesis, the reader will have an understanding of (1) the notion of conditionals in RE artifacts, (2) how to extract them in fine-grained form, and (3) the added value that the extraction of conditionals can provide to RE

Thermal Infrared Endoscope

According to a 2017 report by Intuitive Surgical, the da Vinci Robotic Surgical System was used in approximately 877,000 surgeries, and this number is projected to increase in the future. During robotic surgical procedures, energy-based tools are frequently used to perform tasks such as cauterization. However, the use of these instruments poses a risk of spreading thermal energy to surrounding tissues and causing accidental damage to vital anatomy. To help mitigate this hazard, here we propose an infrared-based, minimally invasive thermal camera endoscope that can be attached to the existing instrument arms of da Vinci robot. This device allows surgeons to monitor the thermal interactions between surgical instruments and tissue, thus reducing the risk of accidental injury

A research review of quality assessment for software

Measures were recommended to assess the quality of software submitted to the AdaNet program. The quality factors that are important to software reuse are explored and methods of evaluating those factors are discussed. Quality factors important to software reuse are: correctness, reliability, verifiability, understandability, modifiability, and certifiability. Certifiability is included because the documentation of many factors about a software component such as its efficiency, portability, and development history, constitute a class for factors important to some users, not important at all to other, and impossible for AdaNet to distinguish between a priori. The quality factors may be assessed in different ways. There are a few quantitative measures which have been shown to indicate software quality. However, it is believed that there exists many factors that indicate quality and have not been empirically validated due to their subjective nature. These subjective factors are characterized by the way in which they support the software engineering principles of abstraction, information hiding, modularity, localization, confirmability, uniformity, and completeness