Domain Ontology Construction and Evaluation for the Entire Process of Software Testing

Abstract

As an important part of software engineering, software testing is a knowledge-intensive work. In the process of software testing, inconsistent knowledge expression, diverse knowledge carriers, and a few experienced people have mastered most of the knowledge, which hinders the transfer and sharing of domain knowledge. Ontology is widely used in various stages of software engineering to define the semantic relationship between relevant information and knowledge. To solve the problem of knowledge silo in the process of software testing, this article forms an Entire Process Ontology on Software Testing (EPOST). EPOST covers the concepts and relationships of software testing process information, software test object information, and software defect information. The concepts and terms in the ontology are extracted from ISTQB, SWEBOK, IEEE std.829-2008 standard, and IEEE std.610.12-1990 standard. We adopt a comprehensive ontology construction method based on Dev. 101 method and Methontology method. The developed ontology is successfully evaluated by using validation and verification tests. Ontology verification uses an improved FOCA evaluation method by adding a cohesion metric. The evaluation result infers that EPOST has a high quality of ontology and good domain coverage, and achieves the purpose of ontology construction. Finally, we make a case study on the role of EPOST in software testing process. The results show that ontology-based application in the software testing process can promote the sharing and transmission of domain knowledge, and improve the testing process and testing quality.