Contributions and Perspectives in Architectures of Software Testing Environments

Producing high quality software systems has been one of the most important software development concerns. In this perspective, Software Architecture and Software Testing are two important research areas that have contributed in that direction. The attention given to the software architecture has played a significant role in determining the success of software systems. Otherwise, software testing has been recognized as a fundamental activity for assuring the software quality; however, it is an expensive, error-prone, and time consuming activity. For this reason, a diversity of testing tools and environments has been developed; however, they have been almost always designed without an adequate attention to their evolution, maintenance, reuse, and mainly to their architectures. Thus, this paper presents our main contributions to systematize the development of testing tools and environments, aiming at improving their quality, reuse, and productivity. In particular, we have addressed architectures for software testing tools and environments and have also developed and made available testing tools. We also state perspectives of research in this area, including open research issues that must be treated, considering the unquestionable relevance of testing automation to the testing activity.