Launching research project CHAQ

Thu, 2012-09-13 (All day)

ANSYMO (University of Antwerp) and SOFT (VUB) are proud to announce the launching of a research project entitled

Cha-Q
Change-centric Quality Assurance
(Changes as First Class Citizens during Software Development)

This research is driven by the continuous balancing act that all IT organisations are facing: striving for reliability and striving for agility. In the former, organisations optimise for perfection; in the latter they optimise for development speed. Consequently, the research project will investigate ways to reduce the tension between reliability and agility by making changes the primary unit of analysis during quality control.

To investigate how and if our change-centric view positively impacts the software engineering practices we will address the following issues.

• Past changes. Assess the impact of changes on both the test and production code: does the test process meet quality guidelines? Verify whether anomalies occur in the bug database (wrong severity, assigned to wrong product/component). Assure that before releasing a component all severe bugs are indeed fixed.
• Present changes. Release a new version of an API with a list of patches to be executed in order to update all client code in the field. Replay a bug fix that was successful on a given release on a variant release.
• Future changes. Once bugs get assigned, determine who is the best person in the team to handle the request. Instead of running all tests for a given release, run only those tests that are potentially affected by a given change.

This project follows a so-called ''in vivo'' approach: we will replicate experiments that have demonstrated success under lab-conditions (in vitro) in a real-life setting (in-vivo) as a means to confirm our results. To realise this ''in vivo'' approach the project involves an industrial steering board consisting of companies like BARCO, CTG, inventive designers, MediaGenix, TP Vision Belgium (formerly Philips Brugge).

The project itself is sponsored by the IWT under the SBO programme.