Opportunities for Automating Software Testing and Debugging Processes

As a side effect of a digitalized world, software developers are under constant pressure to deliver new features very quickly, while maintaining high software quality. This becomes more and more challenging as the code grows in size and complexity. While agile development puts extra emphasis on writing tests that can be re-executed repeatedly, most programmers find themselves dealing with old code with not much documentation and not many tests in place.
In this presentation, we will go over some opportunities and possibilities for automating software testing and debugging processes, and improving software quality in general. We will discuss methodologies for stress testing and compatibility testing in the context of Java applications, and will present delta debugging as a practical automated approach for debugging regression problems.
We will wrap up the presentation by an overview of our experience on incorporating testing tools into our own software development process at Horus software GmbH. Our almost 10-years-old software product is a Java-based, multi-layer software consisting of a graphical UI, client, server, and database components. Horus regularly integrates contributions from external sources such as university theses and research projects. While such contributions make exciting software features, they are not always written by experienced programmers, which makes it particularly challenging for us to ensure the desired product quality. In this presentation, we report on practical approaches and ideas that help us test and evaluate our code at various levels, and thus improve our users’ experience.