Unit test patterns for multicore software

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Many industry, including Ericsson, experience increased cost of the software verification activity and one of the reasons is the ever growing size of the testing activity itself, as manifested by the increased number of test (case) executions. One reason for this ever increasing number of test executions is the adoption of agile, cross-functional teams, which, under time pressure, focus on showing that the produced application code works as intended, without necessarily verifying all aspects of the software behaviour. One symptom of this phenomenon is duplication in the test code they write. **This project, titled "Unit test patterns for multicore software", aims at better understanding such duplicated test fragments, often referred to as clones. Detecting code clones in test code and understanding their purposes from a testing point of view will allow us to refactor test code to make the testing activity more efficient and therefore free resources (time of cross-functional team members, test case execution time) to make the testing activity more effective. This should result in better software quality. This will constitute a major contribution to the industry partner of this project, namely Ericsson. From a scientific point of view, this project will contribute to knowledge on test code clones, test code clone detection, and test code patterns. **There is anecdotal evidence that these problems are not specific to the industry partner of this project but are shared by other private organizations in Canada, for instance in the aerospace domain. Public knowledge resulting from this project will therefore be of high interest to a broad sector of the industry in Canada.**The Principal Investigator being in charge of university courses, at the undergraduate level as well as at the graduate level, on software verification, validation and testing, public knowledge resulting from this project will help heighten awareness about the issues addressed in this project, thereby better preparing undergraduate and graduate students with skills that will benefit their future employers in Canada. This should result in higher software product quality for these Canadian employers.