Cooperative Software Testing and Analysis：Advances and Challenges

In recent years, to maximize the value of software testing and analysis, we have proposed the methodology of cooperative software testing and analysis (in short as cooperative testing and analysis) to enable testing and analysis tools to cooperate with their users (in the form of tool-human cooperation), and enable one tool to cooperate with another tool (in the form of tool-tool cooperation). Such cooperations are motivated by the observation that a tool is typically not powerful enough to address complications in testing or analysis of complex real-world software, and the tool user or another tool may be able to help out some problems faced by the tool. To enable tool-human or tool-tool cooperation, effective mechanisms need to be developed (1) for a tool to communicate problems faced by the tool to the tool user or another tool, (2) for the tool user or another tool to assist the tool to address the problems. Such methodology of cooperative testing and analysis forms a new research frontier on synergistic cooperations between humans and tools along with cooperations between tools and tools. This article presents recent example advances and challenges on cooperative testing and analysis.