A Requirements-Based Partition Testing Framework Using Particle Swarm Optimization Technique

Modern society is increasingly dependent on the quality of software systems. Software failure can cause severe consequences, including loss of human life. There are various ways of fault prevention and detection that can be deployed in different stages of software development. Testing is the most widely used approach for ensuring software quality. Requirements-Based Testing and Partition Testing are two of the widely used approaches for testing software systems. Although both of these techniques are mature and are addressed widely in the literature and despite the general agreement on both of these key techniques of functional testing, a combination of them lacks a systematic approach. In this thesis, we propose a framework along with a procedural process for testing a system using Requirements-Based Partition Testing (RBPT). This framework helps testers to start from the requirements documents and follow a straightforward step by step process to generate the required test cases without loosing any required data. Although many steps of the process are manual, the framework can be used as a foundation for automating the whole test case generation process. Another issue in testing a software product is the test case selection problem. Choosing appropriate test cases is an essential part of software testing that can lead to significant improvements in efficiency, as well as reduced costs of combinatorial testing. Unfortunately, the problem of finding minimum size test sets is NP-complete in general. Therefore, artificial intelligence-based search algorithms have been widely used for generating near-optimal solutions. In this thesis, we also propose a novel technique for test case generation using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), an effective optimization tool which has emerged in the last decade. Empirical studies show that in some domains particle swarm optimization is equally well-suited or even better than some other techniques. At the same time, a particle swarm algorithm is much simpler, easier to implement, and has just a few parameters that the user needs to adjust. These properties make PSO an ideal technique for test case generation. In order to have a fair comparison of our newly proposed algorithm against existing techniques, we have designed and implemented a framework for automatic evaluation of these methods. Through experiments using our evaluation framework, we illustrate how this new test case generation technique can outperform other existing methodologies

On Effective Potential in Tortoise Coordinate

In this paper, we study the field dynamics in Tortoise coordinate where the equation of motion of a scalar can be written as Schrodinger-like form. We obtain a general form for effective potential by finding the Schrodinger equation for scalar and spinor fields and study its global behavior in some black hole backgrounds in three dimension such as BTZ black holes, new type black holes and black holes with no horizon. Especially, we study the asymptotic behavior of potential at infinity, horizons and origin and find that its asymptotic in BTZ and new type solution is completely different from that of vanishing horizon solution. In fact, potential for vanishing horizon goes to a fixed quantity at infinity, while in BTZ and new type black hole we have an infinite barrier.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure

Phenytoin speciation with potentiometric and chronopotentiometric ion-selective membrane electrodes

We report on an electrochemical protocol based on perm-selective membranes to provide valuable information about the speciation of ionizable drugs, with phenytoin as a model example. Membranes containing varying amounts of tetradodecylammonium chloride (TDDA) were read out at zero current (potentiometry) and with applied current techniques (chronopotentiometry). Potentiometry allows one to assess the ionized form of phenytoin (pKa∼8.2) that corresponds to a negatively monocharged ion. A careful optimization of the membrane components resulted in a lower limit of detection (∼1.6μM) than previous reports. Once the pH (from 9 to 10) or the concentration of albumin is varied in the sample (from 0 to 30gL-1), the potentiometric signal changes abruptly as a result of reducing/increasing the ionized concentration of phenytoin. Therefore, potentiometry as a single technique is by itself not sufficient to obtain information about the concentration and speciation of the drug in the system. For this reason, a tandem configuration with chronopotentiometry as additional readout principle was used to determine the total and ionized concentration of phenytoin. In samples containing excess albumin the rate-limiting step for the chronopotentiometry readout appears to be the diffusion of ionized phenytoin preceded by comparatively rapid deprotonation and decomplexation reactions. This protocol was applied to measure phenytoin in pharmaceutical tables (100mg per tablet). This tandem approach can likely be extended to more ionizable drugs and may eventually be utilized in view of pharmacological monitoring of drugs during the delivery process. © 2015 Elsevier B.V