We have identified a market opportunity in offering STAMP as SaaS
How would you present STAMP?
STAMP is about software testing, a professional activity with recent changes related to business agility and development productivity. These changes lead to the DevOps approach, with more collaboration between development and operation team members, so that they can deploy new services faster. In DevOps, developers write tests cases. Now, we need tools to be able to assess the quality of these tests, and to improve them automatically. STAMP stands for Software Testing Amplification because we use techniques like extreme mutation and mutation testing to amplify the tests. In short, the STAMP tools are testing existing software tests to allow frequent releases of software with better quality.
A large project like STAMP is not just about technology. We have learned a lot in different other dimensions. Genuine collaboration between different actors. The STAMP project has helped create jobs, it led to 3 PhD Thesis, over 30 publications, several feature articles in computing magazines and web portals. Looking back on the project, one of its great achievement is the tight collaboration between academia and industry, between research and implementation.
What role does the Open Source play in STAMP?
The Open Source Software decision is right from the onset of the project. Actually, we would no be part of this project if it were not to deliver OSS results. We were glad to share with the OW2 projects an innovative toolset of four tools that are also being adopted by the industry. These tools target specific segments in the DevOps infinite loop:
• Descartes: for software developers who wish to strengthen their test suite
• DSpot helps increase coverage and ensure the generated tests are of better quality
• CAMP automates the tests on a great number of valid configurations
• Botsing fully and automatically generates a test case that reproduces a runtime exception
How is growing the community around the project results?
The STAMP project provides actual software that you can download and try. We expect the STAMP tools to be used both in research and in industry.
Thanks to multiple workshops and the beta testing campaign, we have created a community that goes way beyond the project partners. The code is clearly available on GitHub but it’s only a repository. At the moment, the project partners are discussing submitting the project to the OW2 code base.
What is your vision for sustainability of the project outcomes?
There are several companies offering test automation tools but none really competing against STAMP. So we have identified a market opportunity in offering STAMP as SaaS. We did some business plan simulations and we think it is possible to launch a profitable business that would levarage the GitHub marketplace.
A word about yourself and your organization
I run OW2, a non-profit open source organization. Our mission is to develop a code base of open source software. We concentrate on infrastructure software, i.e. applications and components for cloud computing and enterprise information systems. We host dozens of projects and represent several thousands of developers worldwide. The OW2 code base is developed by a community of software vendors, system integrators and academics. We support three types of projects: community projects, commercial open source projects and collaborative R&D projects such as STAMP. We are proud to be a partner in the STAMP project as it delivers breakthrough technologies packaged into open source tools that can easily join a professionnal CI/CD chain.