Undergraduate - UnitFIT4004 - System validation and verification, quality and standards

At the completion of this unit students will have -

A knowledge and understanding of:

• the role of validation and verification methods in the system life cycle;
• key issues in software testing, testing levels and testing activities;
• testing techniques - based on testers experience - adhoc testing, exploratory testing - specification-based - equivalence partioning, boundary-value analysis, finite-state machine based, random testing - code-based - control-flow and data-flow technique - fault-based - error seeding, mutation testing - usage-based - reliability measures, operational profile - based on type of apps - web based, OO, component testing - selection and combination of techniques;
• test related measures - evaluation of software under test - fault density, types of faults - evaluation of tests done - criteria such as coverage, thoroughness; mutation score;
• empirical work, replication experiments vs case study.

Developed attitudes that enable them to:

• adhere to software quality engineering principles;
• recognise the importance of adhering to software engineering principles of Validation and Verification and standards in the design and development of test methods;
• have an understanding of inspection and debugging approaches, configuration management, performance, and quality standards issues.

Developed the skills to:

• use IDEs such as Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA and unit testing with JUnit, build management tool such as Maven, continuous integration tool such as Hudson, and code quality monitoring tools such as Sonar and Cobertura, and other similar products to help detect software system defects;
• conduct continuous integration process for the application at unit, integration & system testing level with access to SVN, Hudson Continuous Integration (CI) server etc;
• appreciate how assertion mechanisms impact reasoning;
• be able to analyse and control defects in complex systems.