III: Small: Collaborative Research: Linking Evolving Software Requirements and Acceptance Tests

III：小：协作研究：将不断发展的软件需求和验收测试联系起来

• 批准号: 1218129
• 负责人: Denys Poshyvanyk
• 金额: $ 25万
• 依托单位: College of William and Mary
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1218129&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: III; Small; Collaborative; Research; Linking

Two distinct milestones of any software development lifecycle are requirements gathering and acceptance testing, where a software product is verified against its requirements. Yet this verification is one of the most difficult tasks, since it involves bridging an abstraction gap between high-level descriptions of requirements and their low-level implementations in the source code. Determining how different requirements are covered by acceptance tests is very hard, since it means tracing each acceptance test to specific requirements. Many companies and organizations do not have or cannot invest significant resources into recovering links among requirements, acceptance tests and other artifacts. As a result, software development is not as efficient as it could be, lacking controls to steer the overall testing and bug-fixing effort, and involving extra work peripheral to the core tasks. The end result is a situation in which it is unclear how well software is tested and how much confidence stakeholders can have in it.We are addressing this fundamental problem by defining and developing a new, integrated model for recovering traceability links using execution artifacts, diverse models, and requirements. We develop techniques for automatically generating additional test cases that execute untested code to recover additional traceability links and verify existing ones. To ensure that our approach is effective, we will perform rigorous case studies in real industrial scenarios to evaluate the model, techniques, and methodologies. As a result, the state-of-the-practice in software development will be improved that faces difficulties in ensuing that software products are tested fully with respect to their requirements. Among the broader impacts the project includes developing educational course content, involving underrepresented categories of students, producing software tools under open source licenses, and collaborating with industry to transfer technology.

任何软件开发生命周期的两个不同的里程碑是要求收集和接受测试，其中软件产品根据其要求进行了验证。然而，此验证是最困难的任务之一，因为它涉及在源代码中对需求的高级描述及其低级实现之间的抽象差距。 确定接受测试如何涵盖不同的要求非常困难，因为这意味着将每个接受测试追踪到特定要求。许多公司和组织没有或无法投资大量资源来恢复需求，验收测试和其他工件之间的联系。结果，软件开发的效率并不如它的效率，缺乏控制整体测试和固定工作的控制，并且涉及核心任务的额外工作。最终结果是，不清楚软件的测试方式以及利益相关者对其中有多少信心的情况。我们通过定义和开发一个新的集成模型来解决此基本问题，以使用执行工件，各种模型和需求来恢复Traceabiality链接。我们开发了自动生成其他测试用例的技术，该案例可以执行未经测试的代码以恢复其他可追溯性链接并验证现有的链接。为了确保我们的方法有效，我们将在实际工业场景中进行严格的案例研究，以评估模型，技术和方法论。结果，将改善软件开发的实践实践，这在随后对软件产品的需求进行了充分测试时面临困难。 在更广泛的影响中，该项目包括开发教育课程内容，涉及代表性不足的学生类别，在开源许可下生产软件工具以及与行业合作以转移技术。