RESUMEN

Four papers and a roundtable discussion shed light on the current state of software testing practices. Case studies from industry experience address topics including unit-testing practices, agile testing, and automating software testing. Although many of these approaches show promise, software testing is still one of the more neglected practices within the software development life cycle. Suggestions for improvements in industry and academia are offered.

RESUMEN

Unit tests are popular. However, it's an art to write them in a way that specifies a program's behavior well, and it's laborious to write enough of them to have confidence in an implementation's correctness. Symbolic execution techniques can help increase code coverage by finding relevant variations of existing unit tests. These techniques can also automatically generate unit tests from an implementation when no prior unit tests exist. Commercial testing tools are already adopting these techniques.This article is part of a special.