A knowledge management approach for testing open source software systems

Abstract

The development of open source software (OSS), and their deployment by general public as well as by different types of organizations, has increased manifold over the past decade or so. In spite of the ubiquity of OSS, the quality of many OSS remains questionable. Testing provides a curative approach for OSS quality assurance, and a comprehensive approach to testing is a knowledge-intensive endeavor. The management of knowledge in the OSS test process forms a perpetual cycle of creation, dissemination, and acquisition of test knowledge.

Open Source Software Development Process: A Systematic Review

“…Table 1 presents these findings sorted by publication type. [27] General OSS process Conference [12] General OSS process Conference [8] General OSS process Conference [28] General OSS process Conference [29] General OSS process Conference [30] General OSS process Conference [9] General OSS process Conference [18] Continuous integration Conference [6] General OSS process Conference [31] Testing Conference [32] General OSS process Conference [33] General OSS process Conference [34] General OSS process Conference [35] Testing Conference [36] General OSS process Conference [4] General OSS process Conference [37] General OSS process Conference [38] General OSS process Conference [39] Bug Symposium [40] Quality assurance Symposium [41] General OSS process Workshop [42] Bug Workshop [11] General OSS process Workshop Table 1: List of included studies sorted by publication type As Table 1 shows, the biggest part of the included studies were published in conferences (17 studies -51.51%) followed by journals (10 studies -30.30%), workshops (3 studies -9.09%) and symposiums (2 studies -6.06%). Publications from conferences and journals include some of the most renowned SE venues such as the International Conference on Software Engineering, the Journal of Information and Software Technology, the Journal of Systems Software and the Transactions on Software Engineering.…”

“…They present information and characteristics regarding the whole OSS process activities and roles. On the other hand, there are studies that address specific activities (sub-processes) or practices in OSS environment, namely testing [31,35], quality assurance [21,40], bugs [39,42] and continuous integration [18] (see Table 1).…”

“…OSS community has the advantage of great user involvement and a structured approach to handle bugs [11]. These points collaborate with test activities leading to produce a high-quality software product [35]. The huge majority of the included papers mentioned software testing activity [27,6,31,19,4,21,11,34,25,26,35,33,41,22,12,8,10,28,23,29,30,9,40].…”

“…These points collaborate with test activities leading to produce a high-quality software product [35]. The huge majority of the included papers mentioned software testing activity [27,6,31,19,4,21,11,34,25,26,35,33,41,22,12,8,10,28,23,29,30,9,40]. Unit test is the most common test approach in OSS development [11] followed by pre-release testing [11,26,25].…”