Knowledge based system for software testing

Abstract

Software development is conceptually a complex, knowledge intensive and a collaborative activity, which mainly depends on knowledge and experience of the software developers. Software testing is a sub area of software engineering which is also a knowledge intensive and collaborative activity. Effective software testing activities relies on the knowledge collaboration where every software tester shares his/her knowledge or acquires knowledge from others. Finding relevant knowledge within the software testing team or within the experts inside the company is not an easy task. There is a need to represent and process knowledge in an affordable and manageable manner. In this context, principles of knowledge management are pointed out as an important means to manage software testing knowledge. The research contributes in knowledge management in software testing, especially managing the software testing knowledge. An ontology based expert system is designed to share software testing knowledge and can be used to support sharing of knowledge and learning practices in other software companies.