Topic: Test Algebra for Concurrent Combinatorial Testing in a Cloud Environment

Speaker: Professor Wei-Tek Tsai (School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University)

Time: 9:30am, 12th June 2014

Venue: Lecture Room (B501), 5th Floor, Building #5

Abstract：

Cloud computing introduced many new software techniques as well as new issues. New requirement engineering processes, design techniques, code generation, and testing techniques need to be developed for cloud applications.

This talk will present an algebraic system, Test Algebra (TA), for identifying faults in combinatorial testing for SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications. SaaS is a new software delivery model, and mission-critical applications are composed, deployed, and executed in cloud platforms. Testing SaaS applications is a challenging task because new applications need to be tested when they are composed before they can be deployed for execution.

Combinatorial testing algorithms can be used to identify faulty configurations and interactions from 2-way to k-way where k is the number of components in the application. The TA defines rules to identify faulty configurations and interactions. Using the rules defined in the TA, a collection of configurations can be tested concurrently in different servers, in any order including asynchronous testing, and the merge of test results obtained will be still the same due to the TA constraints. Furthermore, if there are mistakes in testing, TA rules will identify them when inconsistent test results from different processors are merged.

This talk will present TA including its logic and properties with experiment results including simulation and cloud experiments.

Keywords: Combinatorial testing, algebra, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Bio：

Dr. Wei-Tek Tsai is currently a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley. He has over 400 papers in various journals and conferences with over 6000 citations. His recent work is related to SaaS (including architecture, scalability, migration, redundancy management, recovery, and tenant composition) and TaaS (Testing-as-a-Service). He travels widely and was a Director of an EU project in Europe.