The February 2014 issue (vol. 47, no. 2) of IEEE Computer is a special issue on testing. The overview of the four articles points out the wide range of domains and diverse of applications that require testing and points out that no one approach will work for everything.
The first article, “An Extensible Framework for Online Testing of Choreographed Services”, focuses on service oriented architectures (SOA). The authors describe current problems in testing SOA software and then describe a framework architecture that supports a continuous online testing process.
The next article, “Penetration Testing in Web Services”, looks at the effectiveness of automated tools for detecting vulnerabilities in Web service applications. The article discusses how effective automated testing is compared to code inspection by experts.
The third article, “Moving Forward with Combinatorial Interaction Testing”, is an overview of this subject. CIT is an effective failure detection method for many types of software systems. CIT has been a trendy topic in the past few years, spawning dozens of tools, an annual workshop at the International Conference on Software Testing, and many highly cited papers.
The last paper, “Mobile Application Testing – Research Practice, Issues, and Needs”, reviews available tools for mobile application testing. The article covers both commercial and open-source tools and discusses the open problems in mobile application testing.
