Submitted Abstract
In modern society, everyday activities depend more and more on the use of software. This increasing dependence of human life on software constitutes the evaluation of its quality crucial. This is especially true in the financial sector where software faults can severely damage an institution’s reputation. Software testing is one of the most widely-adopted means of evaluating and ensuring software quality. Testing also constitutes a key element in modern software development which leverages agile methodologies to shorten product release cycles and time to market. Unfortunately, testing’s reassurance comes with a high cost: testing requires considerable resources, human and machine alike; many work hours are spent in creating and maintaining test artifacts and a lot of computation power is required to cover testing needs, costing millions of euros. Thus, there is a clear need to control and reduce testing costs without sacrificing its effectiveness. The TESTFAST (Software testing in a fast, clever and effective way) project aims at tackling this problem in the industrial settings of our private partner, BGL BNP Paribas (BGL). More precisely, the project aims at addressing two key challenges that are related to modern development practices: (1) how to create effective tests and (2) how to reduce the execution cost of tests, creating a more efficient continuous integration pipeline without affecting its test effectiveness. Providing solutions to these problems will considerably improve the testing processes at BGL and will empower its developers to perform their everyday work in a better way, leading to enhanced software development processes, increased developer satisfaction and productivity, high-quality end products and increased customer satisfaction.