Cemal Yilmaz

Ethem Utku Aktas, Cemal Yilmaz

Softtech, being a subsidiary of the largest private bank in Turkey, called IsBank, receives an average of 350 issue reports from the field every day. Manually assigning the reported issues to the software development teams is costly and cumbersome. We automate the issue assignments using data mining approaches and share our experience gained by deploying the resulting system at Softtech/IsBank. Automated issue assignment has been studied in the literature. However, most of these works report the results obtained on open source projects and the remaining few, although they use commercial, closed source projects, carry out the assignments in a retrospective manner. We, on the other hand, deploy the proposed approach, which has been making all the assignments since Jan 12, 2018. This presents us with an unprecedented opportunity to observe the practical effects of automated issue assignment in the field and to carry out user studies, which have not been done before in this context. We observe that it is not just about deploying a system for automated issue assignment, but also about designing/changing the assignment process around the system; the accuracy of the assignments does not have to be higher than that of manual assignments in order for the system to be useful; deploying such a system requires the development of additional functionalities, such as detecting deteriorations in assignment accuracies in an online manner and creating human-readable explanations for the assignments; stakeholders do not necessarily resist change; and gradual transition can help stakeholders build confidence.

Bestoun S. Ahmed, Angelo Gargantini, Kamal Z. Zamli et al.

Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is a useful testing technique to address the interaction of input parameters in software systems. In many applications, the technique has been used as a systematic sampling technique to sample the enormous possibilities of test cases. In the last decade, most of the research activities focused on the generation of CIT test suites as it is a computationally complex problem. Although promising, less effort has been paid for the application of CIT. In general, to apply the CIT, practitioners must identify the input parameters for the Software-under-test (SUT), feed these parameters to the CIT tool to generate the test suite, and then run those tests on the application with some pass and fail criteria for verification. Using this approach, CIT is used as a black-box testing technique without knowing the effect of the internal code. Although useful, practically, not all the parameters having the same impact on the SUT. This paper introduces a different approach to use the CIT as a gray-box testing technique by considering the internal code structure of the SUT to know the impact of each input parameter and thus use this impact in the test generation stage. We applied our approach to five reliable case studies. The results showed that this approach would help to detect new faults as compared to the equal impact parameter approach.

Hanefi Mercan, Cemal Yilmaz

We believe that we can exploit the benefits of combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) on many "non-traditional" combinatorial spaces using many "non-traditional" coverage criteria. However, this requires truly flexible CIT approaches. To this end, we introduce Unified Combinatorial Interaction Testing (U-CIT), which enables practitioners to define their own combinatorial spaces and coverage criteria for testing, and present a unified construction approach to compute specific instances of U-CIT objects. We, furthermore, argue that most (if not all) existing CIT objects are a special case of U-CIT and demonstrate the flexibility of U-CIT on a simple, yet realistic scenario.