Testing Complex Applications - Software Testing: Testing Across the Entire Software Development Life Cycle - page 252

The standardization challenges have been exacerbated by the diversity of computing
devices that support wireless communication.
The software development challenges to extend the current applications into
the wireless environment have been enormous. The plethora of viable devices run-
ning a wide range of successful applications attests to the software development
profession's creativeness and persistence. The approach to software test planning
and execution described in this textbook is appropriate for the wireless environment
but with some warnings. At the moment, testing wireless applications is very work
intensive for two reasons. The fi rst reason is the complexity of the test environment
and test data needed. The second reason is the absence of tools in the market for
automatically managing and executing wireless test scripts.
Although the needs for wireless software testing are not academically rigorous
enough to be termed “testing research,” there is a clear need for pioneers to extend
current approaches and fi nd new approaches that assist the testing profession to keep
up with the wireless development technologies.
15.4 SOFTWARE TESTING NEAR FUTURE
CHALLENGES
The next quantum leap in software development after wireless applications is auto-
nomic computing. The term, as it is currently used in the industry, means a comput-
ing system that can “heal itself.” The concept is gaining in importance because of the
complexity of very large-scale computing platforms being designed for the scientifi c
arena. The challenges in writing operating systems for such “self-healing” systems
are signifi cant. These signifi cant challenges increase as “self-healing” applications
are designed to run on the “self-healing” operating systems.
Testing autonomic systems would be suffi ciently challenging if all we had to
achieve was validation that the “healing” process was correct, that is, the expected
“healing” matches the actual “healing.” Basic testing approaches will need to be
carefully extended to address the “healing” paradigm in a manner similar to the
wireless application testing extensions.
We believe that successfully testing autonomic systems will require a testing
paradigm shift to validate the feature of autonomic systems not present in other
software, namely the ability to “self-diagnose.” In order for the software to start a
“healing” process, the software must somehow detect that it is “injured.” It is this
detection process that will need either new testing approaches or a new testing par-
adigm … or both. We suggest that this is a fertile area for both practitioner and
academic software testing research.
15.5 SOFTWARE TESTING CHALLENGES TO COME
Stand back from the immediate and near-term software development challenges for a
minute and consider where the challenge combinations might take you. One possible