Outsourcing, subcontracting and COTS

Tor Stålhane

Contents

We will cover the following topics• Testing as a confidence building activity• Testing and outsourcing• Testing COTS components• Sequential testing• Simple Bayesian methods

Responsibility

It is important to bear in mind that• The company that brings the product to the

marketplace carries full responsibility for the product’s quality.

• It is only possible to seek redress from the company we outsourced to if we can show that they did not fulfill their contract

Testing and confidence

The role of testing during:• Development – find and remove defects.• Acceptance – build confidence in the component

When we use testing for COTS or components where the development has been outsourced or developed by a subcontractor, we want to build confidence.

A product trustworthiness pattern

Product is trustworthy

Trustworthinessdefinition

Product related

Process related

People related

Environment definition

System definition

Means to create product trustBased on the product trust pattern, we see that

we build trust based on • The product itself – e.g. a COTS component• The process – how it was developed and

tested• People – the personnel that developed and

tested the component

A process trustworthiness pattern

Activity is trustworthy

Argument byconsideringprocess

Trustworthinessdefinition

Process definition

Team is competent

Method addressproblem

Process istraceable

Means to create process trust

If we apply the pattern on the previous slide we see that trust in the process stems from three sources:

• Who does it – “Team is competent”• How is it done – “Method addresses problem”• We can check that the process is used

correctly – “Process is traceable”

Testing and outsourcing If we outsource development, testing need to

be an integrated part of the development process. Testing is thus a contract question.

If we apply the trustworthiness pattern, we need to include requirements for

• The component - what• The competence of the personnel – who• The process – how

Outsourcing requirements - 1

When drawing up an outsourcing contract we should include:

• Personnel requirements – the right persons for the job. We need to see the CV for each person.

• Development process – including testing. The trust can come from– A certificate – e.g. ISO 9001– Our own process audits

Outsourcing requirements - 2

Last but not least, we need to see and inspect some important artifacts:

• Project plan – when shall they do what?• Test strategy – how will they test our

component requirements?• Test plan – how will the tests be run?• Test log – what were the results of the tests?

Trust in the component

The trust we have in the component will depend on how satisfied we are with the answers to the questions on the previous slide.

We can, however, also build our trust on earlier experience with the company. The more we trust the company based on earlier experiences, the less rigor we will need in the contract.

Testing COTSWe can test COTS by using e.g. black box testing

or domain partition testing.Experience has shown that we will get the

greatest benefit from our effort by focusing on tests for

• Internal robustness• External robustness

Robustness – 1

There are several ways to categorize these two robustness modes. We will use the following definitions:

• Internal robustness – the ability to handle faults in the component or its environment. Here we will need wrappers, fault injection etc.

• External robustness – the ability to handle faulty input. Here we will only need the component “as is”

Robustness – 2

The importance of the two types of robustness will vary over component types.

• Internal robustness - components that are only visible inside the system border

• External robustness – components that are part of the user interface.

Internal robustness testing

Internal robustness is the ability to• Survive all erroneous situations, e.g.

– Memory faults – both code and data– Failing function calls, including calls to OS

functions• Go to a defined, safe state after having given

the error message• Continued after the erroneous situation with a

minimum loss of information.

Why do we need a wrapperBy using a wrapper, we obtain some important

effects:• We control the component’s input, even

though the component is inserted into the real system.

• We can collect and report input and output from the component.

• We can manipulate the exception handling and effect this component only.

What is a wrapper – 1 A wrapper has two essential characteristics • An implementation that defines the functionality

that we wish to access. This may, or may not be an object (one example of a non-object implementation would be a DLL whose functions we need to access).

• The “wrapper” class that provides an object interface to access the implementation and methods to manage the implementation. The client calls a method on the wrapper which access the implementation as needed to fulfill the request.

What is a wrapper – 2 A wrapper provides interface for, and services to, behavior that is defined elsewhere

Fault injection – 1 On order to test robustness, we need to be able

to modify the component’s code – usually through fault injection.

A fault is an abnormal condition or defect which may lead to a failure.

Fault injection involves the deliberate insertion of faults or errors into a computer system in order to determine its response. The goal is not to recreate the conditions that produced the fault

Fault injection – 2 There are two steps to Fault Injection:• Identify the set of faults that can occur

within an application, module, class, method. E.g. if the application does not use the network then there’s no point in injecting network faults

• Exercise those faults to evaluate how the application responds. Does the application detect the fault, is it isolated and does the application recover?

Examplebyte[] readFile() throws IOException { ... final InputStream is = new FileInputStream(…); ... while((offset < bytes.length) && (numRead = is.read(bytes,offset,(bytes.length-offset))) >=0) offset += numRead; ... is.close(); return bytes;}

What could go wrong with this code?

• new FileInputStream() can throw FileNotFoundException• InputStream.read() can throw IOException and

IndexOutOfBoundsException and can return -1 for end of file

• is.close() can throw IOException

Fault injection – 3

• Change the code– Replace the call to InputStream.read()

with some local instrumented method– Create our own instrumented InputStream

subclass possibly using mock objects– Inject the subclass via IoC (requires some

framework such as PicoContainer or Spring)• Comment out the code and replace with throw new IOException()

Fault injection – 4

Fault injection doesn’t have to be all on or all off. Logic can be coded around injected faults, e.g. for InputStream.read():

• Throw IOException after n bytes are read

• Return -1 (EOF) one byte before the actual EOF occurs

• Sporadically mutate the read bytes

External robustness testing – 1

Error handling must be tested to show that• Wrong input gives an error message• The error message is understandable for the

intended users• Continued after the error with a minimum loss

of information.

External robustness testing – 2

External robustness is the ability to• Survive the input of faulty data – no crash• Give an easy-to-understand error message

that helps the user to correct the error in the input

• Go to a defined state• Continue after the erroneous situation with a

minimum loss of information.

Easy-to-understand message – 1

While all the other characteristics of the external robustness are easy too test, the error message requirement can only be tested by involving the users.

We need to know which info the user needs in order to:

• Correct the faulty input• Carry on with his work from the component’s

current state

Easy-to-understand message – 2

The simple way to test the error messages is to have a user to

• Start working on a real task • Insert an error in the input at some point

during this taskWe can then observe how the user tries to get

out of the situation and how satisfied he is with the assistance he get from the component.