Test Automation Workshop (TAW)
August 27-28 2009Bond University, Gold Coast
Co-hosted by Centre for Software Assurance, Bond University and K. J. Ross & Associates
Keynote Speakers
Sam WarwickAccess Testing
Sam Warwick has over twenty years experience designing and implementing automated test systems. He has worked with the majority of leading test automation tools on a diverse range of projects, environments and technologies. He was the founding director of Odin Technology and lead developer of the Axe Automated Testing Framework. Sam was an early adopter of .NET and has been developing and testing with .NET technologies for many years.
Automated Testing - Past, Present and Future
Commercial test automation tools have been around and evolving for two decades. Most established tool vendors have now replaced earlier legacy tools with newer versions. Recent years have seen a growing number of open-source tools emerge and gain mainstream adoption as viable alternatives. Likewise the industry's approaches to implementing automated testing have continued to evolve, albeit at a somewhat slower rate.
This presentation will take a retrospective look at the history of automation and how this has lead to the current plethora of tools and practices currently in use today. Despite all the tools and technology changes it can still be seen that there are a number of fundamental automation principals that remain unchanged. Finally we take a look at what the future might hold for the next generation of test automation tools and practices.
Jonathan Jacky
University of Washington
Jonathan Jacky is a Research Scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, and is also a consultant with Modeled Computation LLC. He has both research and industrial experience, producing and assessing software for scientific research laboratories, hospitals, and systems software companies. He has taught at universities and industry in the USA, China, and India. He is the author of The Way of Z: Practical Programming with Formal Methods (1997), and is co-author of Model-based Software Testing and Analysis with C# (2008).
Automated Testing in Your Favorite Language
Automated testing is recommended where so many test cases are needed that it would be infeasible to code them all by hand. In many of these frameworks test cases are generated and checked automatically, using some kind of model that describes the intended behavior of the implementation under test. Sometimes the model is a finite state machine or a specification in some formal notation.
I will discuss model programs, where the model is coded in the test engineer's usual programming language, often the same language as the implementation. Several organizing principles can be expressed using model programs in any language: conformance defined in terms of traces, model programs as collections of guarded update rules, composition of model programs for structuring, validation, and scenario control, and on-the-fly testing to cope with nondeterminism. I will describe experience with Spec Explorer and NModel, where model programs are written in C#, and PyModel, where they are written in Python.
