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Prioritising Security Tests on Large-Scale and Distributed Software Development Projects by Using Self-organised Maps

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Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9950))

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Abstract

Large-scale and distributed software development initiatives demand a systematic testing process in order to prevent failures. Significant amount of resources are usually allocated on testing. Like any development and designing task, testing activities have to be prioritised in order to efficiently validate the produced code. By using source code complexity measurement, Computational Intelligence and Image Processing techniques, this research presents a new approach to prioritise testing efforts on large-scale and distributed software projects. The proposed technique was validated by automatically highlighting sensitive code within the Linux device drivers source code base. Our algorithm was able to classify 3, 077 from 35, 091 procedures as critical code to be tested. We argue that the approach is general enough to prioritise test tasks of most critical large-scale and distributed developed software such as: Operating Systems, Enterprise Resource Planning and Content Management systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Such as: Git, Subversion, Mercurial and CVS.

  2. 2.

    Such as: Redmine, Bugzilla, Atlassian Jira and Github.

  3. 3.

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/linux/MAINTAINERS.

  4. 4.

    https://bugzilla.kernel.org/.

  5. 5.

    Teams that contains other teams, like: Network Drivers or DRM Drivers.

  6. 6.

    http://www.asus.com/About_ASUS/Corporate_Social_Responsibility/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Marcos Alvares, Fernando Buarque de Lima Neto & Tshilidzi Marwala

  2. University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

    Fernando Buarque de Lima Neto & Tshilidzi Marwala

Authors
  1. Marcos Alvares
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  2. Fernando Buarque de Lima Neto
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  3. Tshilidzi Marwala
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marcos Alvares .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Tokyo , Tokyo, Japan

    Akira Hirose

  2. Kobe University , Kobe, Japan

    Seiichi Ozawa

  3. Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Onna, Japan

    Kenji Doya

  4. Nara Institute of Science and Technology , Ikoma, Japan

    Kazushi Ikeda

  5. Kyungpook National University , Daegu, Korea (Republic of)

    Minho Lee

  6. Chinese Academy of Sciences , Beijing, China

    Derong Liu

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Alvares, M., de Lima Neto, F.B., Marwala, T. (2016). Prioritising Security Tests on Large-Scale and Distributed Software Development Projects by Using Self-organised Maps. In: Hirose, A., Ozawa, S., Doya, K., Ikeda, K., Lee, M., Liu, D. (eds) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9950. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46681-1_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46681-1_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-46680-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-46681-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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