Cooperative Testing and Analysis: Human-Tool, Tool-Tool and Human-Human Cooperations to Get Work Done

Tool automation to reduce manual effort has been an active research area in various sub fields of software engineering such as software testing and analysis. To maximize the value of software testing and analysis, effective support for cooperation between engineers and tools is greatly needed and yet lacking in state-of-the-art research and practice. In particular, testing and analysis are in a great need of (1) effective ways for engineers to communicate their testing or analysis goals and guidance to tools and (2) tools with strong enough capabilities to accomplish the given testing or analysis goals and with effective ways to communicate challenges faced by them to engineers -- enabling a feedback loop between engineers and tools to refine and accomplish the testing or analysis goals. In addition, different tools have their respective strengths and weaknesses, and there is also a great need of allowing these tools to cooperate with each other. Similarly, there is a great need of allowing engineers (or even users) to cooperate to help tools such as in the form of crowd sourcing. A new research frontier on synergistic co operations between humans and tools, tools and tools, and humans and humans is yet to be explored. This paper presents recent example advances on cooperative testing and analysis.