Software Testing, Software Quality and Trust in Software-Based Systems

In our daily life we increasingly depend on software-based systems deployed as embedded software control systems in the automotive domain, or the numerous health or government applications. Software-based systems are more and more developed by reusable components available as commercial off-the-shelf components or open source components. The successful introduction of such integrated systems into businesses however does depend whether we trust the system or not. Trust and therewith the quality of software-based systems is determined by many properties such as completeness, consistency, maintainability, security, safety, reliability, and usability, among others. However during the development of software-based systems there are many opportunities to introduce errors in the different phases of the software development lifecycle. Testing is commonly applied as the predominant activity in industry to ensure high software quality providing a wide variety of methods and techniques to detect different types of errors in software-based systems. The panel goal is to discuss software testing strategy and techniques to improve the quality of the software and at the same time to build trust with customers. The panel will discuss the experts view on what the key factors are in developing high quality software-based systems. Through the panel, the discussions shall include the impact of testing on software quality within several domains and their businesses.