IEEE September/October Issue, Blog, and SE Radio Summary

Associate Editor: Brittany Johnson (@drbrittjay)

The September/October Issue of IEEE Software, top magazine for all things software, again delivers a range of interesting topics for thought and discussion in the SE community. The topics discussed in this issue included software requirements and testing, DevOps, gamification, and software architecture.

The feature topic in this issue of IEEE Software was software testing. This issue featured the following articles related to software testing:

• "State-of-the-Art Software Testing" by Diomidis Spinellis (From The Editor)
• "Adaptive Virtual Gestures for GUI Testing on Smartphones" by Chia-Wei Hsu, Shan-Hsin Lee, and Shiuhpyng Winston Shieh
• "KLOVER: Automatic Test Generation for C and C++ Programs, Using Symbolic Execution" by Hiroaki Yoshida, Guodong Li, Takuki Kamiya, Indradeep Ghosh, Sreeranga Rajan, Susumu Tokumoto, Kazuki Munakata, and Tadahiro Uehara
• "Worlds Apart: Industrial and Academic Focus Areas in Software Testing" by Vahid Garousi and Michael Felderer
• "Software Testing: The State of the Practice" by Mohamad Kassab, Joanna F. DeFranco, and Phillip A. Laplante
• "Replicating Rare Software Failures with Exploratory Visual GUI Testing" by Emil Elégroth, Johan Gustafsson, Henrik Ivarsson, and Robert Feldt

For those interested in getting a quick overview of how testing is used and viewed in the software community, "Software Testing: The State of the Practice" and "Worlds Apart: Industrial and Academic Focus Areas in Software Testing" are great articles to read.

In "Software Testing: The State of the Practice", Kassab and colleagues conducted a comprehensive survey of software practitioners to gain a much needed understanding of the state-of-the-art in software testing and quality assurance practices.

Their ultimate goal was to gather and be able to disseminate best practices to community based on their findings, such as practicing test-driven development.

In "Worlds Apart: Industrial and Academic Focus Areas in Software Testing", Garousi and Felderer discusses the problem of the often disparate efforts between industry and academy when it comes to academia doing research that matters and industry applying this research to their work.

Their focus was on software testing and how we can improve industry-academic collaborations.

They observed titles of presentations given at industrial and academic conferences and, using Wordle to create word clouds, found that these communities often focus on different aspects of testing. 

For example, industry conferences most often talk about automation while academic conferences most often talk about models. The authors make suggestions, such as inviting practitioners to research-intensive SE conferences to gain their perspective on the research we're doing.

Some of the articles in this issue focus on a specific subset of testing, such as GUI testing. 

In "Adaptive Virtual Gestures for GUI Testing on Smartphones", Hsu and colleagues propose an approach to testing mobile software called adaptive GUI testing (AGT). AGT allows for faster cross-device testing and is based on touch events known as visually oriented gestures (VOG). 

Along the same lines, in "Replicating Rare Software Failures with Exploratory Visual GUI Testing", Elégroth and colleagues discuss the benefits of visual GUI testing (VGT) based on their own experiences. They speak about how VGT can be used to replicate failures and push forward analysis of infrequent or nondeterministic failures. 

IEEE Software Blog

Behind on your IEEE Software issues? No worries! Summaries from the May/June and July/August issues of IEEE Software are up in the IEEE Software Blog. On the technical side, this issue features blog posts on merge conflicts and using code metrics to predict fault and change proneness. On the not-so-technical (but obviously still software-related) side, this issue features articles that explore behaviors in OS projects, such as understanding the mindset of one-time contributors and female participation in OS software. Among the not-so-technical blog posts, a developer from the Debian project observes and analyzes the social structure within the project based on the cryptographic keyring of the project.

SE Radio

This issue of SE Radio didn't see any new hosts but lots of interesting discussions on interesting topics, ranging from choosing freelancing as a career path to machine learning for predictive applications.  For the software engineers out there, Haroon Meer, founder of Thinkst, spoke with SE Radio on what's going wrong with network security in our applications and what we can do better.

For aspiring software engineers out there, Evgeny Shadchnev discussed code schools, or programs available that prepare students to become software developers in a few months.

For those in management positions, or aspiring to be a manager one day, Ron Lichty joined SE Radio to discuss difficulties and suggestions for managing programmers. He also provided a link to his blog on the topic. Also useful is the information provided by Harsh Sinha, VP of TransferWise, on another type of management known as product management.