Antonia Bertolino (CNR/ISTI, Italy)

Software development processes have greatly evolved in the last years. The life-cycle of modern ICT systems stems from the convergence of tremendous advances achieved in several research fields: model-driven approaches allow developers to abstract away platform details and focus on the relevant domain-related concepts, component-based development supports modular production, powerful and expressive formal methods enforce rigor and precision, software architecture helps to master complexity.

A concern that persists across all evolutions and innovations of software technology, though, is that of ensuring that the developed systems fulfill the purposes for which they are conceived: this is the goal of Verification and Validation (V&V). V&V comprehends all those activities and processes that go side by side with software development and aim at verifying the integrity, adequacy and conformance of the produced artifacts.

As systems become more and more complex, distributed, and heterogeneous, in equal measure grows the difficulty of verifying them. Therefore, research in V&V remains very active. From basic manual inspection up to sophisticated analyses, many different V&V techniques can be applied, and the QUATIC2010 V&V track collects a good sample.

Automated model checkers are attracting much attention. In “Synthesis-Based Loose Programming”, Lamprecht et al. propose a novel approach to synthesize a system from an original mixed textual and graphical formalism. The synthesis is combined with continuous automated model-checking verification.

The most widespread approach to V&V in industry is testing, thus not surprisingly Quatic2010 V&V track includes several papers dealing with testing from different perspectives. In the paper “Test Coverage Analysis of UML Activity Diagrams for Interactive Systems”, Ferreira et al. propose the MoCAT tool for model coverage analysis, that visualizes the coverage achieved by a given test suite over a UML model, thus providing a valid help to testers to better comprehend test adequacy.

In “A Formal Passive Testing Approach For Checking Real Time Constraints”, Bessayah and Cavalli propose a formal approach for verifying the conformance of system behavior to formally specified real time properties (in particular they propose XCTL as the specification language). The verification is done via passive testing, i.e., by collecting execution traces and verifying their conformance to the specified properties.

With the advent of model-driven engineering, model transformation approaches are drawing increasing attention. It is imperative to perform accurate and reliable transformations. Two papers in the track deal with testing of transformations: in “MANTra: towards model transformation testing”, Filieri et al. propose a tool for unit testing of QVT Operational transformations, while in “X-MuT: A Tool for the Generation of XSLT Mutants”, Lonetti and Marchetti automatise mutation testing of XSLT stylesheets.

Many companies are migrating towards service-oriented development. Hence approaches and tools for V&V of service-oriented applications are needed. In “A Pluggabe/ESB-based Framework for Test Automation of Service-Based Applications”, Ilieva and coauthors present the TASSA framework providing a composable set of tools for functional and non-functional validation of service-oriented systems. In “Model-driven Service Integration Testing - A Case Study”, Wieczorek et al. report about the experimentation in SAP of a model-based testing approach in a service-oriented context.

Towards quality of V&V, human factors yield great importance. The track includes two field studies: Lazaro et al. ask themselves: “Do testers’ preferences have an impact on effectiveness?”, i.e., as opinions and tastes influence the decisions that testers make, do they eventually impact the number of detected defects? To answer such question, the paper presents the results of an empirical study matching testers’ preferences among functional testing, structural testing and code review to their observed effectiveness. In “The definition of a testing process to small-sized companies: the Brazilian scenario”, Rodrigues et al. report the highlights from a recent survey aimed at identifying the factors that influence the adoption of testing processes.

• Chair - Antonia Bertolino (CNR/ISTI)

• Local Co-Organizing Chair - André Restivo (FEUP)

• Rui Abreu, University of Porto, Portugal
• Maria Jose Escalona, University of Seville, Spain
• Nicolas Guelfi, Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg
• Sylvia Ilieva, Sofia University, Bulgaria
• Thierry Jeron, INRIA, France
• Natalia Juristo, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
• Patricia Machado, Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil
• Eda Marchetti, ISTI-CNR, Italy
• Raffaela Mirandola, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Dorina Petriu, Carleton University, Canada
• Ralf Reussner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Neha Rungta, NASA Ames Research Center, USA

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