Software testing forever: old and new processes and techniques for validating today's applications

Software testing is a very complex activity deserving a first-class role in software development. Testing related activities encompass the entire development process and may consume a large part of the effort required for producing software. In this talk, I will first organize into a coherent framework the many topics and tasks forming the software testing discipline, pointing at relevant open issues. Then, among the outlined challenges, I will focus on some hot ones posed by the testing of modern complex and highly dynamic systems. What is assured is that software testers do not risk to remain without their job, and testing researchers are not at short of puzzles. Software testing is and will forever be a fundamental activity of software engineering: notwithstanding the revolutionary advances in the way it is built and employed (or perhaps exactly because of), the software will always need to be eventually tried and monitored. In the years, software testing has evolved from an "art" to a discipline, but test practice largely remains a trial-and-error methodology. We will never find a test approach that is guaranteed to deliver a "perfect" product, whichever is the effort we employ. However, what we can and must pursue is to transform testing from "trial-and-error" to a systematic, cost-effective and predictable engineering practice.