Coordinated Collaborative Testing of Shared Software Components

Software developers commonly build their software systems by reusing other components developed and maintained by third-party developer groups. As the components evolve over time, new end-user machine configurations that contain new component versions will be added continuously for the potential user base. Therefore developers must test whether their components function correctly in the new configurations to ensure the quality of the overall systems. This would be achievable if developers could provision the configurations in house and conduct regression testing over the configurations. However, this is often very time-consuming and also there can be redundancy in test effort between developers when a common set of components is reused for providing the functionality of the systems. In this paper, we present a coordinated collaborative regression testing process for multiple developer groups. It involves a scheduling method for distributing test effort across the groups at component updates, with the objectives of reducing test redundancy between the groups and also shortening the time window in which compatibility faults are exposed to user community. The process is implemented on Conch, a collaborative test data repository and services we developed in our previous work. Conch has been modified to function as the test process coordinator, as well as the shared repository of test data. Our experiments over the 1.5-year evolution history of eleven components in the Ubuntu developer community show that developers can quickly discover compatibility faults by applying the coordinated process. Moreover, total testing time is comparable to the scenario where the developers conduct regression testing only at updates of their own components.