Property-Based Testing - The ProTest Project

The ProTest project is an FP7 STREP on property based testing. The purpose of the project is to develop software engineering approaches to improve reliability of service-oriented networks; support fault-finding and diagnosis based on specified properties of the system. And to do so we will build automated tools that will generate and run tests, monitor execution at run-time, and log events for analysis. The Erlang / Open Telecom Platform has been chosen as our initial implementation vehicle due to its robustness and reliability within the telecoms sector. It is noted for its success in the ATM telecoms switches by Ericsson, one of the project partners, as well as for multiple other uses such as in facebook, yahoo etc. In this paper we provide an overview of the project goals, as well as detailing initial progress in developing property based testing techniques and tools for the concurrent functional programming language Erlang

Performance evaluation of a distributed integrative architecture for robotics

The eld of robotics employs a vast amount of coupled sub-systems. These need to interact cooperatively and concurrently in order to yield the desired results. Some hybrid algorithms also require intensive cooperative interactions internally. The architecture proposed lends it- self amenable to problem domains that require rigorous calculations that are usually impeded by the capacity of a single machine, and incompatibility issues between software computing elements. Implementations are abstracted away from the physical hardware for ease of de- velopment and competition in simulation leagues. Monolithic developments are complex, and the desire for decoupled architectures arises. Decoupling also lowers the threshold for using distributed and parallel resources. The ability to re-use and re-combine components on de- mand, therefore is essential, while maintaining the necessary degree of interaction. For this reason we propose to build software components on top of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web Services. An additional bene t is platform independence regarding both the operating system and the implementation language. The robot soccer platform as well as the associated simulation leagues are the target domain for the development. Furthermore are machine vision and remote process control related portions of the architecture currently in development and testing for industrial environments. We provide numerical data based on the Python frameworks ZSI and SOAPpy undermining the suitability of this approach for the eld of robotics. Response times of signi cantly less than 50 ms even for fully interpreted, dynamic languages provides hard information showing the feasibility of Web Services based SOAs even in time critical robotic applications

Application of vehicle's can based network in transmission service load data acquisition

The implementation of various electronic subsystems in passenger cars and different kinds of on-road and off-road vehicles is constantly expanding. Accordingly the new vehicles, instead of being mechanical systems, become advanced mechatronic systems whose development and testing call for a new approach. Possibility of using data available on vehicles network seems to be extremely powerful tool on it. The paper deals with a new approach for service load data measurement and acquisition as a helpful tool in development and testing of vehicles. Based on complexity of the system and different communication protocols on the vehicles' networks it was found as extremely practical solution to make approach which will be based on standards which are widely accepted by the industry. The new approach is based on hardware and software platform oriented to the main vehicle controllers with the task to acquire data which exist on the network and which are relevant to the transmission service load. The said hardware as well as software utilities have to enable computer based monitoring of the vehicle systems behaviour and in that way to be the tool for new vehicles development. The new system was tested in real service. It was found that the system can enable significantly less time of vehicle instrumentation before testing and accurate data acquisition

Application of vehicle's can based network in transmission service load data acquisition

The implementation of various electronic subsystems in passenger cars and different kinds of on-road and off-road vehicles is constantly expanding. Accordingly the new vehicles, instead of being mechanical systems, become advanced mechatronic systems whose development and testing call for a new approach. Possibility of using data available on vehicles network seems to be extremely powerful tool on it. The paper deals with a new approach for service load data measurement and acquisition as a helpful tool in development and testing of vehicles. Based on complexity of the system and different communication protocols on the vehicles' networks it was found as extremely practical solution to make approach which will be based on standards which are widely accepted by the industry. The new approach is based on hardware and software platform oriented to the main vehicle controllers with the task to acquire data which exist on the network and which are relevant to the transmission service load. The said hardware as well as software utilities have to enable computer based monitoring of the vehicle systems behaviour and in that way to be the tool for new vehicles development. The new system was tested in real service. It was found that the system can enable significantly less time of vehicle instrumentation before testing and accurate data acquisition

E-Testing based on service oriented architecture

The extensive use of technology in learning and working, is forcing its use in the assessment process. A lot of software packages exist in the market to realize automated assessment. Several of them are very comprehensive, but most of them are stand alone applications without possibilities for interoperability, adaptability according to learner characteristics and possibilities for content reuse. In this paper we describe the purposes and the process of designing an interoperable E-Testing Framework by remodelling an existing E-Testing system and introducing new structured Service Oriented Architecture, based on encapsulating existing business functions as loosely coupled, reusable, platform-independent services which collectively realize required business objectives. This common framework should support interoperable content, exchange of data and learner profiles, and give the possibility for search and retrieval of any data bank content in local and remote repositories

Scalability analysis comparisons of cloud-based software services

Performance and scalability testing and measurements of cloud-based software services are necessary for future optimizations and growth of cloud computing. Scalability, elasticity, and efficiency are interrelated aspects of cloud-based software services’ performance requirements. In this work, we use a technical measurement of the scalability of cloud-based software services. Our technical scalability metrics are inspired by metrics of elasticity. We used two cloud-based systems to demonstrate the usefulness of our metrics and compare their scalability performance in two cloud platforms: Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. Our experimental analysis considers three sets of comparisons: first we compare the same cloud-based software service hosted on two different public cloud platforms; second we compare two different cloud-based software services hosted on the same cloud platform; finally, we compare between the same cloud-based software service hosted on the same cloud platform with two different auto-scaling policies. We note that our technical scalability metrics can be integrated into a previously proposed utility oriented metric of scalability. We discuss the implications of our work

Cloud based testing of business applications and web services

This paper deals with testing of applications based on the principles of cloud computing. It is aimed to describe options of testing business software in clouds (cloud testing). It identifies the needs for cloud testing tools including multi-layer testing; service level agreement (SLA) based testing, large scale simulation, and on-demand test environment. In a cloud-based model, ICT services are distributed and accessed over networks such as intranet or internet, which offer large data centers deliver on demand, resources as a service, eliminating the need for investments in specific hardware, software, or on data center infrastructure. Businesses can apply those new technologies in the contest of intellectual capital management to lower the cost and increase competitiveness and also earnings. Based on comparison of the testing tools and techniques, the paper further investigates future trend of cloud based testing tools research and development. It is also important to say that this comparison and classification of testing tools describes a new area and it has not yet been done

A Framework for Agile Development of Component-Based Applications

Agile development processes and component-based software architectures are two software engineering approaches that contribute to enable the rapid building and evolution of applications. Nevertheless, few approaches have proposed a framework to combine agile and component-based development, allowing an application to be tested throughout the entire development cycle. To address this problematic, we have built CALICO, a model-based framework that allows applications to be safely developed in an iterative and incremental manner. The CALICO approach relies on the synchronization of a model view, which specifies the application properties, and a runtime view, which contains the application in its execution context. Tests on the application specifications that require values only known at runtime, are automatically integrated by CALICO into the running application, and the captured needed values are reified at execution time to resume the tests and inform the architect of potential problems. Any modification at the model level that does not introduce new errors is automatically propagated to the running system, allowing the safe evolution of the application. In this paper, we illustrate the CALICO development process with a concrete example and provide information on the current implementation of our framework