Trends such as globalisation, standardisation and shorter lifecycles place great demands on the flexibility of the software industry. In order to compete and cooperate on an international scale, a constantly decreasing time to market and an increasing level of quality are essential. Testing is at the moment the most important and mostly used quality assurance technique applied in industry. However, the complexity of software and hence of their development amount is increasing. Modern systems get larger and more complex, as they connect large amounts of components that interact in many different ways and have constantly changing and different types of requirements (functionality, dependability, security, etc.). Data processing that impacts all aspects of our life is increasingly distributed over clouds and devices. This leads to new concerns to emerge, such as availability, security, and privacy. Consequently, the development of cost-effective and high-quality systems opens new challenges that cannot be faced only with traditional testing approaches. New techniques for systematization and automation of testing throughout the software and system life-cycle are required.
Even though many test automation tools are currently available to aid test planning and control as well as test case execution and monitoring, all these tools share a similar passive philosophy towards test case design, selection of test data and test evaluation. They leave these crucial, time-consuming and demanding activities to the human tester. This is not without reason; test case design and test evaluation through oracles are difficult to automate with the techniques available in current industrial practice. The domain of possible inputs (potential test cases), even for a trivial method, program, model, user interface or service is typically too large to be exhaustively explored. Consequently, one of the major challenges associated with test case design is the selection of test cases that are effective at finding flaws without requiring an excessive number of tests to be carried out. Automation of the entire test process requires new thinking that goes beyond test design or specific test execution tools.
These are the problems that this research group is working on. One of the most interesting results of the group is the TESTAR tool (testar.org) for automated testing at the Graphical User Interface level
