Exploring Tools and Techniques for Distributed Continuous Quality Assurance

November 8, 2006
Adam Porter | University of Maryland

Dynamic analyses, such as testing and profiling, play a key role in state-of-art approaches to software quality assurance (QA). With a few rare, (but notable) exceptions, these analyses are performed in-house, on developer platforms, using developer-provided input workloads. The shortcomings of focusing on in-house QA efforts alone include increased cost and schedule for extensive QA activities and misleading results when the input test-cases and workload differs from actual workloads or when the in-house system or execution environment differ from that found in the field.

To improve this situation we are developing tools and techniques to support a new approach to dynamic analyses called Distributed, Continuous Quality Assurance (DCQA). Our vision is that DCQA processes will execute around-the-world and around-the-clock, on a virutal computing pool made of up of numerous end-user machines. Our approach divides QA processes into multiple subtasks that are intelligently distributed to client machines around the world, executed by them, and their results returned to central collection sites where they are fused together to complete the overall QA process.

In this talk we will describe our general approach and infrastructure, present novel algorithms for efficiently executing DCQA processes, and describe the results of several large-scale feasibility studies.

Speaker Details

Adam A. Porter earned his B.S. degree summa cum laude in Computer Science from the California State University at Dominguez Hills, Carson, California in 1986. In 1988 and 1991 he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Irvine.Currently an associate professor, he has been with the department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland since 1991. He is a winner of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award and the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence in the College of Computer, Mathematics, and Physical Sciences. He is a former member of the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and a current member of editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.His general research interests include empirical methods for identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in industrial development processes, experimental evaluation of fundamental software engineering hypotheses, and development of tools that demonstrably improve the software development process.Dr. Porter is a member of the ACM and IEEE Computer Society.