SUMMARY Model‐based testing has not been widely deployed in industry yet. There seem to be both technical and non‐technical reasons for this situation. A survey among mobile software testing professions in Finland was conducted that aimed at investigating possible obstacles and opportunities towards wider deployment of this technology. This paper discusses the results and provides conclusions that indicate that at least in this context, there is much interest among practitioners towards the technology. However, more research is needed to make model creation and maintenance as easy as possible. In addition, metrics should be developed that can be used to report test results in the same manner as using existing testing techniques, enabling comparison between different approaches. Special emphasis should also be placed on enabling quick bug localization. Furthermore, it seems that successful pilot projects are a key to wider industrial adoption. Based on the survey findings, an agenda for the future model‐based testing research is outlined. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents experiences in model-based graphical user interface testing of Android applications. We present how model-based testing and test automation was implemented with Android, including how applications were modeled, how tests were designed and executed, and what kind of problems were found in the tested application during the whole process. The main focus is on a case study that was performed with an Android application, the BBC News Widget. Our goal is to present actual data on the experiences and to discuss if advantages can be gained using model-based testing when compared with traditional graphical user interface testing. Another contribution of this paper is a description of a keyword-based test automation tool that was implemented for the Android emulator during the case study. All the models and the tools created or used in this case study are available as open source.

The fact that model-based testing has not yet attained a high rate of adoption in industry can in part be attributed to the perceived difficulty of debugging long error traces often produced by the online version of this technology. Given the extensive manual labor commonly involved in the debugging phase, automating parts of this process could yield considerable productivity benefits. This paper presents viable debugging strategies applicable in model-based graphical user interface testing, from which two methods were refined and experimented with. The first is based on superimposing log-derived, synchronized subtitles on recorded test run footage, while the second addresses error trace shortening. The results obtained from applying these methods in real-life case studies demonstrate the practical utility of these methods.

Aspects have emerged as an attractive mechanism for implementing "testability features" to existing systems. Their invasive nature facilitates increasing the testability of systems that could be very hard to test otherwise. However, prior to industrial adoption, case studies are needed to understand how they differ from conventional techniques. Such techniques include macros and test interfaces, which can be easier to use and manage. In this paper, we compare the use of aspects to macros and test interfaces in increasing the testability of a relative small-sized industrial system. We report our initial experiences and try to provide guidelines for choosing between these alternatives.

In this paper, we describe the contributions to the workshop on domain specific approaches to software test automation. The workshop consists of six accepted papers and a keynote speech. The papers tackle a wide range of topics related to the testing of applications within specific domains including event driven software, synchronous safety critical software, web applications, wireless sensor networks, and mobile phone applications. Each of the papers describes the influence of the domain on the testing process.

When specifying distributed real-time systems, decomposition and composition are the primary methods for coping with complexity. Typically, decomposition can be done in two orthogonal dimensions. First, the system is decomposed in the vertical dimension by partitioning the distributed system into loosely-coupled subsystems with well-defined interfaces. Each subsystem is then decomposed further in the horizontal dimension usually in a top-down fashion. However with this approach it is easy to introduce unnecessary complexity due to two facts. Firstly the interfaces between subsystems are defined before capturing their collective behaviour. Secondly, application-specific parts, that cross-cut the two dimensions, are scattered around in different components of the subsystems. Furthermore, they are tangled with other parts. In recent years the recognition of problems related with scattering and tangling in object-oriented software systems has led to an introduction of an aspect-oriented design methodology enabling different, possibly overlapping, design concerns to be decomposed separately before composing them together In this paper specification architectures for distributed real-time systems are addressed which support capturing of collective behaviour in diverse dimensions of concerns at a high level of abstraction.

A practical theory for operational specification of reactive systems is described. Reasoning on temporal properties is made possible by it already at high levels of abstraction, and rigorous refinement towards implementation is supported. The paper discusses how the underlying logic, execution model, and refinement methods fit together, and how object-orientation, distribution, and real time are supported. A closer look is taken on the specification of real-time properties by illustrating the approach by a logically layered specification of simple mobile robot control software.