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Project

BaseCamp Zero - Towards Zero-Touch Testing.

The DevOps approach combined with a cloud-native application offers disruptive businesses (e.g., Netflix, Spotify, Zalando, Amazon, Uber) the strategic advantage to deploy their services rapidly and world-wide. Other software-intensive organisations will undoubtedly follow suit. Despite this strategic advantage, cloud-native applications imply a major risk. Their testability is hampered by non-determinism in the distributed and event-driven behavior that characterises their dominant architectural styles (i.e., micro-services and serverless), which is exacerbated by the dynamic cloud environment in which they operate. Assuring the quality of a cloud-native application therefore remains ––even with DevOps–– a major challenge. The key to DevOps quality assurance lies in automated test suites that scrutinize each code change before it is deployed into production. These give rise to an emerging research field named "zero-touch testing": enable a system to decide for itself what, when, where, and how testing should be performed. The Basecamp Zero project aims to advance the state-of-the-art towards the dream of fully autonomous (= "zero-touch") software testing. The project will build upon recent advances in test generation and test amplification to enrich them in the context of a cloud-native application. An advisory board consisting of ten representative industrial partners will oversee the application potential. The tool prototypes resulting from the Basecamp Zero project will first be tested on a carefully selected suite of open source systems (TRL 3). Promising results will be further explored with the DevOps teams part of the advisory board via realistic pilot-cases (TRL 4). Dissemination activities will solicit follow-up projects with industrial partners in Flanders and Europe. Tool licensing (possibly exploited by means of a spin-off company) is a long term potential avenue for valorisation.
Date:1 Oct 2022 →  Today
Keywords:SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, SOFTWARE TESTING, SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE, SOFTWARE TOOLS
Disciplines:Computer architecture and networks not elsewhere classified, Software engineering
Project type:Collaboration project