Self-adaptive testing in the field: the past, the present and the future

We are increasingly surrounded by systems connecting us with the digital world and facilitating our life by supporting our work, leisure, activities at home, health, etc. These systems are pressed by two forces. On the one side, they operate in environments that are increasingly challenging due to uncertainty and uncontrollability. On the other side, they need to evolve, often in a continuous fashion, to meet changing needs, to offer new functionalities, or also to fix emerging failures. To make the picture even more complex, these systems rarely work in isolation and often need to collaborate with other systems, as well as humans. All such facets call for moving their validation during operation, as offered by approaches called testing in the field. In this talk, we show that even the field-based testing approaches should change over time to follow and adapt to the changes and evolution of collaborating systems or environments or users’ behaviors. We also present a taxonomy of this new category of testing that we call self-adaptive testing in the field (SATF), together with a reference architecture for SATF approaches. Finally, we additionally highlight the major research challenges and gaps in SATF. To achieve this objective, we surveyed the literature and collected feedback and contributions from experts in the domain via a questionnaire and interviews.