Failure Patterns: A Powerful Tool to Optimize Your Testing

As professionals, we have always known that exhaustive testing is rarely feasible or affordable. Thus, we must find more efficient and effective approaches to testing. Discovering these approaches depends on the availability of data about defects-and this is where testers run into real problems. Few testers create experiments to measure their own testing effectiveness. Even fewer examine their results for statistical significance. Thus starved of sound data, we are forced to use our intuition. However, strong evidence indicates that today's software failure patterns are very similar to past patterns that have been studied. Exploiting past work is highly beneficial to the practice and economics of today's testing, allowing us to concentrate our tests where they are likely to be most fruitful. Join Les Hatton as he presents failure patterns from commercial case studies and recent experiments with sophisticated data mining techniques. Patterns extracted from the Common Vulnerabilities Database and other similar sources help us to be more effective testers.