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Monash University

FIT4004 System validation and verification, quality and standards - Semester 1, 2014

This unit covers the fundamental products, processes and techniques for system validation and verifications including testing methodologies, static program analysis and code quality measurement and monitoring. Open-source tools will be used to apply in practice knowledge learnt about software testing from a theoretical perspective. Inspection and testing methodologies, analysis of artefacts, robustness, performance analysis configuration management, quality assurance plan and standards, compliance, assessment, certification issues are covered. It shows how to predict, analyse and control defects in complex software systems.

Mode of Delivery

Clayton (Day)

Workload Requirements

Minimum total expected workload equals 12 hours per week comprising:

(a.) Contact hours for on-campus students:

  • Two hours of lectures
  • One 1-hour tutorial

(b.) Additional requirements (all students):

  • A minimum of 2-3 hours of personal study per one hour of contact time in order to satisfy the reading and assignment expectations.

Additional workload requirements

You will need to allocate one hour per week for unsupervised lab/tute activity in the MUSE Lab to get familiarised with tools, work on assignments and for self study.

Unit Relationships

Prohibitions

CSE4431

Prerequisites

MAT1830 and FIT2004 and FIT2024 and FIT3077

Chief Examiner

Campus Lecturer

Clayton

Robert Merkel

Consultation hours: Tuesday 3-5pm, Thursday 12-1pm

Tutors

Clayton

Your feedback to Us

Monash is committed to excellence in education and regularly seeks feedback from students, employers and staff. One of the key formal ways students have to provide feedback is through the Student Evaluation of Teaching and Units (SETU) survey. The University’s student evaluation policy requires that every unit is evaluated each year. Students are strongly encouraged to complete the surveys. The feedback is anonymous and provides the Faculty with evidence of aspects that students are satisfied and areas for improvement.

For more information on Monash’s educational strategy, see:

www.monash.edu.au/about/monash-directions/ and on student evaluations, see: www.policy.monash.edu/policy-bank/academic/education/quality/student-evaluation-policy.html

Previous Student Evaluations of this Unit

Previous feedback has highlighted the following strengths in this unit:

  • Practical, progmamming based project
  • Challenging and stimulating tutorials and assignment

Student feedback has also informed improvements to this unit including:

  • The assignment timing and weights have been adjusted to reflect their relative difficulty level
  • Practical sessions have been introduced to make tools/systems more accessible to students unfamiliar with them

If you wish to view how previous students rated this unit, please go to
https://emuapps.monash.edu.au/unitevaluations/index.jsp

Academic Overview

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit, students should be able to:
  • explain the importance of quality assurance in software engineering;
  • articulate the role of validation and verification methods in the system development life cycle; key issues in software testing, testing levels and testing techniques;
  • categorise and apply selection and combination of techniques and test related measures;
  • measure, evaluate and analyse software under test using different quality and complexity metrics;
  • develop adequate test cases to help detect software system defects using industry-strength IDEs, unit testing frameworks such as JUnit, code coverage tools such as Cobertura, and other similar products;
  • implement continuous integration (CI) at unit, integration & system testing level using a CI server such as Jenkins to automatically run regression test suites on the system under test.

Unit Schedule

Week Activities Assessment
0   No formal assessment or activities are undertaken in week 0
1 Overview, Fundamentals of Software Testing  
2 Mathematics for software testing & quality: set theory, graph theory, etc. Weekly assessed tutorials start in Week 2
3 Black-box testing Unit, Integration, System and Continuous testing - Phase 1 due Week 3
4 White-box testing I  
5 White-box testing II  
6 Component testing  
7 Software quality & metrics Unit, Integration, System and Continuous testing - Phase 2 due Week 7
8 System testing  
9 Object-oriented testing  
10 Mutation testing  
11 A comparison of software verification and validation techniques Unit, Integration, System and Continuous testing - Phase 3 due Week 11
12 Web testing overview  
  SWOT VAC No formal assessment is undertaken in SWOT VAC
  Examination period LINK to Assessment Policy: http://policy.monash.edu.au/policy-bank/
academic/education/assessment/
assessment-in-coursework-policy.html

*Unit Schedule details will be maintained and communicated to you via your learning system.

Teaching Approach

Lecture and tutorials or problem classes
This teaching and learning approach provides facilitated learning, practical exploration and peer learning.

Assessment Summary

Examination (2 hours): 50%; In-semester assessment: 50%

Assessment Task Value Due Date
Unit, Integration, System and Continuous testing - Phase 1 10% Week 3
Unit, Integration, System and Continuous testing - Phase 2 15% Week 7
Unit, Integration, System and Continuous testing - Phase 3 15% Week 11
Tutorial Participation 10% Weekly
Examination 1 50% To be advised

Assessment Requirements

Assessment Policy

Assessment Tasks

Participation

Students are expected to attend all tutorials and participate in active discussions. Tutorials will carry 10% assessment and will be assessed on participation.

  • Assessment task 1
    Title:
    Unit, Integration, System and Continuous testing - Phase 1
    Description:
    The first phase of the semester-long project consists of two parts:
    • System setup, 
    • Implementation as specified in the assignment specification, and
    • Unit testing of the various component classes in the code base provided to and extended by you.
    Weighting:
    10%
    Criteria for assessment:

    This assignment is evaluated on the correctness and completeness of the work:

    • System setup, and
      • Successful setup of the working environment on personal laptops, and
      • Successful connection to the integration server.
    • Implementation
      • Completeness of the implementation.
    • Unit testing
      • Developing functionality according to a given specification,
      • Successfully invoking automated builds on the server, and
      • Development of non-trivial unit tests appropriate for specified system functionality.

    No written or file submission is required for this assessment. It will be based only on a demo in the tutorial and answering queries & during an interview.

    Due date:
    Week 3
  • Assessment task 2
    Title:
    Unit, Integration, System and Continuous testing - Phase 2
    Description:
    The second phase of the semester-long project focuses on integration testing.

    You will continue to develop the system based on a given specification and write unit tests and integration tests for the newly developed components. Such tests will also need to be automatically executed on the continuous integration server.


    Weighting:
    15%
    Criteria for assessment:

    The assignment will be assessed by its correctness and completeness. 

    • Sufficient functionality in the different layers of the system.
    • Sufficient testing adequacy of the developed functionality.

    No written or file submission is required for this assessment. It will be based only on a demo in the tutorial and answering queries & during an interview.

    Due date:
    Week 7
  • Assessment task 3
    Title:
    Unit, Integration, System and Continuous testing - Phase 3
    Description:
    The third phase of the semester-long project focuses on system testing.

    You will continue to develop the system based on a given specification and write unit tests, integration tests and system tests for the newly developed components. Such tests will also need to be automatically executed on the continuous integration server.


    Weighting:
    15%
    Criteria for assessment:

    The assignment will be assessed by its correctness and completeness. 

    •  Sufficient functionality of the whole system (backend and the Web frontend).
    • Sufficient testing adequacy of the components and the system.

    Assessment will consist of a demo & interview in the tutorial and a short written report.

    Due date:
    Week 11
  • Assessment task 4
    Title:
    Tutorial Participation
    Description:
    Tutorials run from Week 2 through to Week 12. Questions related to lectures, assignment demos and literature reading will be conducted in tutorials.
    Weighting:
    10%
    Criteria for assessment:

    Active participation in discussions.

    Due date:
    Weekly

Examinations

  • Examination 1
    Weighting:
    50%
    Length:
    2 hours
    Type (open/closed book):
    Open book
    Electronic devices allowed in the exam:
    None

Learning resources

Reading list

  • Jorgensen, Paul C. (2008), Software Testing, A Craftsman's Approach, 3rd Edition, Auerbach Publications.
  • M Pezze and M Young (2007), Software Testing and Analysis, Wiley Publ.
  • J F Peters and W Pedrycz (2000), Software Engineering: An Engineering Approach, J Wiley Publ.
  • Robert V. Binder (1999), Testing Object-Oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools, Addison-Wesley.
  • David A Sykes John D McGregor (2001), Practical Guide to Testing Object-Oriented Software, Addison-Wesley.
  • Daniel J.Mosley, Bruce A. Posey (2002), Just Enough Software Test Automation, Addison-Wesley.
  • Jerry Gao,  H S Tsao and Ye Wu (2003), Testing and Quality Assurance for Component-based Software, Artech House.
  • Matt Staats, Michael W. Whalen, Mats P.E. Heimdahl. Programs, Tests, and Oracles: The Foundations of Testing Revisited. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’11). 2011, pages 391-400. ACM.
  • Fraser, G., Wotawa, F., & Ammann, P. E. (2009). Testing with model checkers: a surveySoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability19(3), 215-261.
  • Majumdar, R., & Sen, K. (2007, May). Hybrid concolic testing. In Software Engineering, 2007. ICSE 2007. 29th International Conference on (pp. 416-426). IEEE.
  • Jia, Y., & Harman, M. (2011). An analysis and survey of the development of mutation testingSoftware Engineering, IEEE Transactions on37(5), 649-678.
  • Arcuri, A., Iqbal, M. Z., & Briand, L. (2010). Formal analysis of the effectiveness and predictability of random testing. In Proceedings of the 19th international symposium on Software testing and analysis (pp. 219-230). ACM.

Monash Library Unit Reading List (if applicable to the unit)
http://readinglists.lib.monash.edu/index.html

Faculty of Information Technology Style Guide

Feedback to you

Examination/other end-of-semester assessment feedback may take the form of feedback classes, provision of sample answers or other group feedback after official results have been published. Please check with your lecturer on the feedback provided and take advantage of this prior to requesting individual consultations with staff. If your unit has an examination, you may request to view your examination script booklet, see http://intranet.monash.edu.au/infotech/resources/students/procedures/request-to-view-exam-scripts.html

Types of feedback you can expect to receive in this unit are:

  • Informal feedback on progress in labs/tutes
  • Graded assignments without comments
  • Solutions to tutes, labs and assignments

Extensions and penalties

Returning assignments

Assignment submission

It is a University requirement (http://www.policy.monash.edu/policy-bank/academic/education/conduct/student-academic-integrity-managing-plagiarism-collusion-procedures.html) for students to submit an assignment coversheet for each assessment item. Faculty Assignment coversheets can be found at http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/resources/student/forms/. Please check with your Lecturer on the submission method for your assignment coversheet (e.g. attach a file to the online assignment submission, hand-in a hard copy, or use an online quiz). Please note that it is your responsibility to retain copies of your assessments.

Online submission

If Electronic Submission has been approved for your unit, please submit your work via the learning system for this unit, which you can access via links in the my.monash portal.

Required Resources

Please check with your lecturer before purchasing any Required Resources. Limited copies of prescribed texts are available for you to borrow in the library, and prescribed software is available in student labs.

The MUSE Lab in Bldg 26/G13 is the lab used for this unit. However, students are required to install the required software on their laptops to minimise interruptions to development and testing. The required software include:

  • Tools for Software testing such as JUnit 4.x (latest vers)
  • Java build management Apache Maven 2.x or 3.x 
  • The version control system Subversion
  • An open source or commercial Java IDE (Eclipse, NetBeans or IntelliJ IDEA)

Software may be:

  • Downloaded from:
    • http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
    • http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/
    • http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.html
    • http://maven.apache.org/download.html
  • A free classroom license for IntelliJ IDEA will be provided via Moodle

Recommended Resources

Students are encouraged to use their own laptops to work on project assignments. All required software can be downloaded and installed onto personal laptops.

Recommended text(s)

Jorgensen, Paul C. (2008). Software Testing, A Craftsman's Approach. (3rd Edition) Auerbach Publications.

Other Information

Policies

Monash has educational policies, procedures and guidelines, which are designed to ensure that staff and students are aware of the University’s academic standards, and to provide advice on how they might uphold them. You can find Monash’s Education Policies at: www.policy.monash.edu.au/policy-bank/academic/education/index.html

Key educational policies include:

Faculty resources and policies

Important student resources including Faculty policies are located at http://intranet.monash.edu.au/infotech/resources/students/

Graduate Attributes Policy

Student Charter

Student services

Monash University Library

Disability Liaison Unit

Students who have a disability or medical condition are welcome to contact the Disability Liaison Unit to discuss academic support services. Disability Liaison Officers (DLOs) visit all Victorian campuses on a regular basis.

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