Prof. Giorgio Brajnik | January 23, 2019 | 11:00 | N.1.42 (Germanistik)

Abstract

Testing lies at the heart of software development. Tightly woven with requirements engineering, the testing process influences how software is developed and its quality.  With adoption of agile and devops approaches, the continuous testing process has to rely on a testing strategy that is multi-level and has to balance test automation and exploratory testing.  Because so many things need to be tested, and because the system under test changes very often and rapidly, effectiveness and sustainability of the testing process is a must.

I will present an approach for automating end-to-end testing that is based on UML specifications of the behavior of the system and a toolkit that automatically generates source code supporting definition of high level test cases and related artifacts. In this way, a software development team can avoid dealing with low level details and focus instead on what needs to be tested, what test conditions need to be covered, how test results affect requirements coverage. This kind of information constitutes then a living documentatio of the system specification which can be used to guide exploratory testing. Such an approach is currently being used in mobile apps (in the area of workforce management) and web apps (in the financial domain).

Bio

Giorgio Brajnik is associate professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Udine, Italy. He holds a degree in Computer Science (from the University of Udine) and a PhD in Computer Science (from the University of Manchester). After working on information search systems, since 1999 his focus is on methods for effective assessment of accessibility and quality of websites and web applications and more recently on model-based techniques for analysis of user interfaces.

At the university he teaches courses on object oriented programming and accessibility and user centered web development.  In ’92 and ’95-’96 he was visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been invited lecturer, panelist and visiting professor in Europe, the U.S. and New Zealand. He participated to several of the W3C working groups dealing with accessibility. He also supervised the development of accessibility testing tools when he was working with a company he cofounded, Usablenet Inc.  Currently he is scientific advisor for Interaction Design Solutions, a startup company he co-founded that is specialized on model-driven techniques for software system testing.

He is program committee member of several conferences, including the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility and ACM Assets, for which he was co-chair of the Doctoral Consortium  and also General Chair; he is regular reviewer for several journals. Additional details are available at www.dimi.uniud.it/giorgio/vitae.html.