An augmented software testing design now delivered as a pure service
How would you present STAMP?
From my point of view STAMP is some kind of augmented reality to the service of software testing design: when I, as a developer, design test cases and test configurations for my software, STAMP helps me to enhance my design with several variants, also assessing how good are my test design.
It’s not a bare “generate-automatically-code” tool that works for me (designing a test case is an intellectual human activity that no computer in the world can emulate), it’s a tool that empowers my design.
What is your role in STAMP?
I’m the WP4 leader. This work package aims to integrate STAMP in developers toolboxes and toolchains, and to provide potential STAMP users with relevant documentation and courseware to adopt it as easily as possible. In this activity, I had a very fruitful collaboration with all other partners, mainly with OW2, INRIA, ATOS, XWiki and ActiveEon as they are the main partners involved in WP4, and this is turning out to be a very enriching experience for me.
What key innovation do you bring or help to develop?
At the beginning of the project, the main challenge was to grasp the concept of mutation testing, not so well known in day-by-day software development activities of a system integrator such as Engineering Group.
Once the internals of mutation testing and the automatic generation of test cases and test configurations became clearer, the next question was: how this stuff can be integrated in software tools of daily use to become easy to use? At the moment we focused on the most used tools (developer productivity tools as Maven, Gradle, Eclipse and automation tools as Jenkins and Gitlab), but the exciting aspect is to make available these amplification services as microservices, in order to offer them as cloud services. This packaging is interesting because it frees STAMP adopters from the constraint of having STAMP execution environments - system and hardware resources that need to be managed -, providing this “augmented software testing design” as a pure service.
A word about yourself and your organization
I’m an employee at Engineering Group and I’m working within a team which provides all company employees with the tools and the best practices needed to make their job in the best way. We provide an infrastructure that helps people to work in agile or traditional ways, with all the tools needed to automate as much as possible software development and quality assurance processes. Moreover we make internal consultancy about software testing with a focus on test automation, performance and security tests and teach several courses about software testing in our corporate IT & Management School. The involvement in STAMP project was a natural consequence.
Biography
Daniele Gagliardi is an electronic engineer with a passion for computer sciences. He's currently working as a technical manager at Engineering Group, in Padua (Italy) with a small but great team of 9 people supporting all Engineering Group employees in making their software solutions as better as possible with the best testing tools and methodologies available today.