Meeting the requirements on software systems is a great challenge in software engineering.
To meet the real user requirements, domain experts need to participate
in the software engineering process. The research work presented here addresses
the integration of domain experts into the testing activities, particularly with respect
to acceptance tests.
Stefan Baerisch presents with MTCC (Model-Driven Test Case Construction)
an innovative approach to formally specifying automated acceptance tests in the
application domain of digital libraries. Digital libraries may be grouped into a system
family of software systems sharing some commonalities as well as some variability.
With MTCC, test cases are generated with model-driven techniques within
the context of the digital-libraries system family. With MTCC, domain experts are
involved into the testing process without requiring programming capabilities from
these domain experts.
In software engineering, it is not sufficient to propose new engineering techniques.
It is required to empirically evaluate the new techniques. The work presented
in this book does not only present the new MTCC approach, it also reports
on a significant empirical evaluation of MTCC by domain experts at the GESIS
institute. Particularly, the detailed documentation of the validation goals and the
according experiment design with a candid discussion of the threads to validity
may serve as an example for other software engineering research projects—which
is why this book is a valuable addition to a researcher’s library