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QW2002 Paper 5G2 Mr. Robert V. Binder Achieving Very High Reliability for Ubiquitous Information Technology |
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The human race is rapidly moving to ubiquitous information technology -- unthethered broadband to the hand: anyone, anything, anytime, anywhere. This adds several degrees of freedom to the already daunting combinatorics of testing. "Five nines" was once arcane telco jargon, but it now headlines press releases from Microsoft. In sharp contrast to hardware advances, present-day software technology is no better at achieving high reliability than it was ten years ago. Software development thus faces a significant challenge. This talk presents a strategy for achieving very high reliability (at least five nines) for ubiquitous IT: automated, mobile-aware, high-fidelity, profile-based, end-to-end testing. The strategy is explained through a brief experience report about its use to achieve very high reliability in large, high-volume, distributed application. The talk concludes with a sketch of how this approach is currently evolving for mobile technology.Outline
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Overview
The Vision
The New IT Reality
The Unchanged IT Reality: Software
Unique Wireless Test Problems
Reliability Arithmetic
Some Reliability Data Points
The New IT Reality: Reliability Sells!
The Engineering Challenge
The Strategy
Testing Process
Testing by Poking Around
Automated Test Script
Automated Generation/Agent
Full Test Automation
Test Effectiveness
Full Automation Case Study
Lessons Learned
Current Work - Wireless Testing System
Conclusion
Robert V. Binder is internationally recognized as an expert on testing and author of the definitive Testing Object-oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools. As president of RBSC Corporation for fifteen years, he's lead many projects to design and build advanced automated testing systems.