Automated Software Testing as a Service

This paper makes the case for TaaS—automated software testing as a cloud-based service. We present three kinds of TaaS: a “program-mer’s sidekick ” enabling developers to thoroughly and promptly test their code with minimal upfront resource investment; a “home edition ” on-demand testing service for consumers to verify the soft-ware they are about to install on their PC or mobile device; and a public “certification service, ” akin to Underwriters Labs, that inde-pendently assesses the reliability, safety, and security of software. TaaS automatically tests software, without human involvement from the service user’s or provider’s side. This is unlike today’s “testing as a service ” businesses, which employ humans to write tests. Our goal is to take recently proposed techniques for auto-mated testing—even if usable only on toy programs—and make them practical by modifying them to harness the resources of com-pute clouds. Preliminary work suggests it is technically feasible to do so, and we find that TaaS is also compelling from a social and business point of view