Enabling collaborative testing across shared software components

Components of numerous software systems are developed and maintained by multiple stakeholders, and there is significant overlap and synergy in the process of testing systems with shared components. We have designed and implemented infrastructure that enables testers of different components to share their test results and artifacts so that they can collaborate in testing shared components. We also develop an example collaborative testing process that leverages our infrastructure to save effort for regression testing of systems with shared components. Our empirical study of this process shows that collaborative testing of component-based software systems can not only save significant effort by sharing test results and artifacts, but also improve test quality of individual components by utilizing synergistic data shared among component testers.