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International Workshop on Large Scale Testing (LT 2014)
March 22, 2014
Many software systems must be tested using a large number of concurrent requests to ensure that they can scale up while maintaining functional and performance requirements. Large scale testing is a challenging area and industry has invested large amount of resources into this. Yet, there are few academic research efforts devoted to large scale testing. In this workshop, we intend to bring together industrial practitioners and researchers to establish and grow an academic research community around this important and practical research topic.
Modern software systems ranging from e-commerce websites to telecommunication infrastructures must service millions of users. Many field problems of these systems are due to their inability to scale to field workloads, rather than feature bugs [3, 12]. In addition to conventional functional testing, these systems must be tested with large volumes of concurrent requests (called the load) to ensure the quality of these systems. The theme of this year's workshop is Large Scale Testing, which includes all different objectives and strategies of testing large scale software systems using load. Examples of large scale testing include live upgrade testing, load testing, high availability testing, operational profile testing, performance testing, reliability testing, stability testing and stress testing.
Large scale testing is a difficult task requiring a great understanding of the system under test. Practitioners face many challenges such as tooling (choosing and implementing the testing tools), environments (software and hardware setup) and time (limited time to design, test, and analyze). Yet, little research is done in the software engineering research. Moreover, prior large scale testing research has been largely focused on telecommunication applications and web-based ecommerce systems. Industry has been focused primarily on creating tools to automatically drive specified load into the system under test. Large scale testing is gaining more importance, as an increasing number of services are being offered in the cloud to millions or even billions of users.
This one-day workshop brings together software testing researchers, practitioners and tool developers to discuss the challenges and opportunities of conducting research on large scale software testing. We expect that the presentations and discussions in this workshop will raise awareness of large scale testing in the software testing academic research community. Furthermore, we expect that the panels and working sessions would provide networking opportunities for world class large scale testing researchers. Finally, we hope this workshop would facilitate collaborations between the academic and industrial researchers by providing academics access to large real-life software systems and large scale testing infrastructures. Our ultimate goal is to establish and grow an active community around this important and practical research topic.