We are happy to announce that Springer released The Future of Software Quality Assurance, to which Elmar and I contributed a chapter on Change-Driven Testing. The entire book, published to mark the 15th anniversary of the International Software Quality Institute (iSQI), is Open Access and may be downloaded from Springer’s website (in English). You may also download only our chapter in English or the German translation.

Abstract

Today, testers have to test ever larger amounts of software in ever smaller periods of time. This makes it infeasible to simply execute entire test suites for every change. Also it has become impractical to manually ensure that the tests cover all changes.

In response to this challenge, we propose Change-Driven Testing. Change-Driven Testing uses Test-Impact Analysis to automatically find the relevant tests for any given code change and sort them in a way that increases the chance of catching mistakes early on. This makes testing more efficient, catching over 90% of mistakes in only 2% testing time.

Furthermore, Change-Driven Testing uses Test-Gap Analysis to automatically identify test gaps, i.e., code changes that lack tests. This enables us to make conscious decisions about where to direct our limited testing resource to improve our testing effectiveness and notifies us about where we are missing regression tests.