Software testing and/or software monitoring: differences and commonalities

Validation is an essential part of the software life cycle. The actual functional and non-functional behaviour of an application needs to be checked against the expected or intended behaviour. Both testing and monitoring are widely used approaches for this purpose. More traditionally testing is considered as a technique for fault removal and forecasting during development. Monitoring is instead conceived for run-time observation of deployed software. Testing and monitoring approaches are usually contrasted as being, respectively, in-the-laboratory vs. in-the-field, and active vs. passive. In this talk I will overview concepts and techniques for software testing and monitoring, and will discuss how for modern pervasive and dynamic software systems the two approaches tend to converge in combined and synergic ways.