Testing and maintenance activities supported by automated tools

Project Information

ATM

Grant agreement ID: 21823

Project closed

Start date 3 June 1996

End date 2 March 1998

Funded under

• Software Best Practice initiative within the framework of the specific research and technological development programme in the field of Information Technologies, 1994-1998

Total cost € 191 600,00

EU contribution € 191 600,00

Coordinated by

Svimservice SpA
Italy

Objective

The interest of SVIMSERVICE is to improve the quality of application software delivered and make the maintenance process more effective with respect to users expectation. This PIE will permit to introduce and formalise a new testing strategy aiming to reduce the overall development costs and increase user satisfaction. Moreover, the experiment results will contribute to improve the Quality System currently adopted by the company.
The specific, measurable objectives for the experiment are following: to create skills and culture of software validation, to experiment techniques and methods for software testing, to introduce testing procedures, standards and automated testing tools.

THE EXPERIMENT

The experiment will be conducted within an improvement scheme taking into account current status of people's technical skills, practices currently used to develop and manage software products, business goals and company commitment on implementing quality and productivity improvement programme.

This improvement process will be tailored to the specific baseline project; in particular, the experiment will concentrate on the formalisation and automation of the aspects that mostly affect the testing phase following code implementation and during the evolutionary maintenance phase (regression test).
The experiment will be conducted on a baseline project which foresees the implementation, the release and the maintenance of a software product for the Public Administration.
SVIMSERVICE employs 168 peoples, 8 of them are involved in the baseline project.

EXPECTED IMPACT AND EXPERIENCE

This experiment aims at significantly reducing this gap by transforming testing activities into a defined and repeatable standard process. At the end of the experimental phase we expect a general improvement in the testing process as well as a significant reduction of the cost/effort values and a more marketable of our software products and to compete on bigger market spaces. Finally, the specific training of personnel will permit the creation of a group which will specialise in testing activities (Validation group).

The introduction of testing procedures in the company Quality System will enable to apply the experimented method to all the other development projects, by contributing so to the improvement of our software development process.

Fields of science

• social sciences › sociology › industrial relations › automation
• natural sciences › computer and information sciences › software › software development
• social sciences › economics and business › economics › production economics › productivity
• natural sciences › computer and information sciences › software › software applications
• social sciences › political sciences › public administration

Programme(s)

• FP4-ESSI 2 - Software Best Practice initiative within the framework of the specific research and technological development programme in the field of Information Technologies, 1994-1998

Topic(s)

• 1.28 - Process Improvement Experiments

Call for proposal

Data not available

Funding Scheme

ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measures

Coordinator

Svimservice SpA

• EU contribution: No data
• Address: Via Massaua Complesso il Faro ; 70123 Bari ; Italy
• Total cost: No data