Testing Distributed and Heterogeneous Systems: State of the Practice

Abstract

In a growing number of domains, such as health-care and transportation, several independent systems, forming a heterogeneous and distributed system of systems, are involved in the provisioning of end-to-end services to users. Testing such systems, running over interconnected mobile and cloud-based platforms, is particularly important and challenging, with little support being provided by current tools. In order to assess the current state of the practice regarding the testing of distributed and heterogeneous systems (DHS) and identify opportunities and priorities for research and innovation initiatives, we conducted an exploratory survey that was responded by 147 software testing professionals that attended industry-oriented software testing conferences, and present the main results in this paper. The survey allowed us to assess the relevance of DHS in software testing practice, the most important features to be tested in DHS, the current status of test automation and tool sourcing for testing DHS, and the most desired features in test automation solutions for DHS. We expect that the results presented in the paper are of interest to researchers, tool vendors and service providers in this field.