Is massive parallel regression testing for embedded software a dream or reality?

Software product line technology is an approach to render cost effectively tailored products to customers as well as markets, utilizing common services or components in a planned manner. Over the past few decades, product lines have been applied to recently introduced software engineering field. For software evaluation, productivity gains are generally related to the development process. In particular, regression testing experiences challenges in the large number of variants or versions of software products that originate from a software product line and are to be tested while facing the risk for redundant testing. Companies propose a visualization approach for helping test managers in improving communication about testing to efficiently utilize test resources.

What is Regression Testing?

It is the method of testing changes to computer programs and it is intended to make sure that still the older programming works with these new changes. In larger companies, regression testing is a common concern of the program development process and it is done by code testing experts. Code test scenarios as well as exercises are developed by test department coders as these are meant to test new code units after these have been written. Such test cases form the test bucket. Before a new software product version is released, to ensure that all the old capacities still work the old test cases are run against the new version. They might not work and it can be due to adding or changing new code to a program. Moreover, errors may arise within the code.

Purpose of Parallel Regression Testing for Embedded Software

The purpose of automation testing is to find unexpected faults and especially those which occur because the developer could not understand fully the correlations of the internal code while extending or modifying code. Every time the code is used or modified in a new environment, regression tests should be applied in order to check the integrity of the code. Ideally, this process is performed nightly (at the time of automated builds) for ensuring that errors are detected or fixed at the earliest.

This regression testing should be closely linked to functional development, and are to be built from the successful test cases used or developed in functional analysis. The test cases, that verified an application's functionality or behavior are then rerun on a regular basis as parallel tests, hence they become the means for verifying that the application keeps working correctly as the new code is being added. During such tests, specified test cases are run and latest results are compared to previously-recorded results. You will be alerted to any sort of discrepancies between control responses and current responses. Subsequent software test runs to remind you of variances until the application returns the expected outcome.

Regression Testing Policies

Software development companies with effective regression tests policies significantly improve the efficiencies of their software development specialists along with the success rate of their projects. Early determination of problems that code modifications introduce, has the ability to save countless hours spent resolving or chasing software errors and thus allowing the team to modify as well as maintain the application without the fear of breaking previously-correct functionality.

An efficacious regression testing for software product line involves the guideline definition for regression system usage, and then the implementation and integration of those guidance in addition to supporting configurations and technologies into your software application testing life-cycle in order to ensure that your team applies the policy regularly or consistently. It requires means to measure as well as monitor the data along with application of the policy it is tracking. Inconsistent utilization may cause new errors getting introduced or existing errors going undetected because of unchecked changes to the code over time.