QWE2000 Session 10I

Mr. Robert L. Probert, Wujun Li, Mr. Paul Sims [Canada]
(School Of Information Technology And Engineering)

"A Risk-Directed E-Commerce Test Strategy"

Full Technical Paper in QWE2000 CD-ROM

Key Points

Presentation Abstract

E-Commerce frameworks and applications are widely regarded as key engines of an evolving web-based economy. Accordingly, developers and vendors must ensure their quality by utilizing the most effective quality engineering (QE) methods and tools known. At the same time, time-to-market (TTM) constraints and resource limitations require efficient methods, especially in software (functional) testing and system reliability and robustness verification.

In this paper, we present our synthesis of a common test strategy used, often unconsciously, by more effective designers and testers in the software and networking industries, namely Risk-Directed Testing of e-commerce applications and systems. We illustrate its industrial application in two areas, namely

Function Test Reliability and Stress (R&S) Verification.

Finally, we give some empirical observations which support our claims of effectiveness and efficiency, and conclude with a few pragmatic guidelines for refining and improving existing industrial QE processes.

About the Speaker

Robert L. Probert received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 1973. He is currently a full Professor in the School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE) and Co-ordinator of the Nortel Networks ASERT (Advanced Software Engineering Research and Training) Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. He is a principal investigator in communications software engineering and protocols for the Communications and Information Technology Ontario (CITO), one of the Ontario Centres of Excellence. He was the first Acting Director of SITE. His research interests and publications are primarily in testing protocols and networking software. Dr. Probert contributed to International Standards in Conformance Testing, including the conception and prototyping of the TTCN Workbench, a complete environment for test suite engineering. Dr. Probert co-chaired the 10th International IFIP Symposium on Protocol Specification, Testing, and Verification and TestCom 2000, the 13th International IFIP Conference on Testing Communicating Systems. He founded the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, and has frequently collaborated in Software Engineering research with industry and government. In 1989, he received Bell-Northern Research (now Nortel Networks) President's Award of Excellence for work in University-Industry interaction and for Communications Standards work. In 1990, he and his TTCN Workbench team received a TRIO Industrial Feedback award for "creating an innovation of great potential industrial utility". Currently, he has industrial R&D collaborations in progress with IBM, Mitel, Nortel Networks, and Rational Software and is presently a Visiting Research Scientist with the IBM Center for Advanced Studies, specializing in e-commerce testing.

Dr. Probert has given tutorials, workshops and keynote presentations on various topics related to software and system quality engineering, and has designed and delivered training modules for a number of computer and telecommunications corporations. He has taught at the Universities of Waterloo, Saskatchewan and Ottawa, and has consulted with industry and government on a wide variety of topics in the areas of testing, software quality and protocol engineering. He has also been a Visiting Researcher in Software Engineering at GE R&D Center, New York, and various Nortel Labs.

Wujun Li is currently working on network management in Nortel Networks. She received B.Sc.of computer egineering from Beijing University of Aeronautics. She has been working with IBM in the area of E-commerce testing, and finished a Master's thesis in this area in University of Ottawa.