Collaborative testing across shared software components (doctoral symposium)

Components of numerous component-based software systems are often developed and tested by multiple stakeholders, and there often exists significant overlap and synergy in the processes of testing systems with shared components. This work demonstrates that testers of shared software components can save effort by avoiding redundant work, and improve the test quality of each component as well as overall software systems by using information obtained when testing across multiple components. My research contains three parts. First, I investigate current testing practices for component-based software systems to find the overlap and synergy we conjecture exists. Second, I design and implement infrastructure and related tools to facilitate communication and data sharing between testers. Third, I design various testing processes to implement different collaborative testing algorithms and apply them to large actively developed software systems.