An Ontology-based Knowledge Management System for Software Testing

Software testing is an important activity in quality assurance and it generates large amount of knowledge. Software testers need to gather domain knowledge to be able to successfully conduct a software testing activity. Not having a proper knowledge base within its own context by software testing environments cause software testers to query limited knowledge available or consult peer software testers, which would greatly impact on their decision-making process. Ontologies emerge as one of the more appropriate knowledge management tools for supporting knowledge representation, processing, storage and retrieval. Given great importance to knowledge for software testing, and the potential benefits of managing software testing knowledge, using semantic web technologies, ontology based knowledge management system is developed. A Software testing knowledge sharing ontology is designed to describe software testing domain knowledge. SPARQL is used as the query language to retrieve software testing knowledge from the semantic storage. Both Ontology experts and non-experts evaluated the developed ontology. We believe our software testing ontology can support other software organizations to improve the sharing of knowledge and learning practices. Keywords—software testing ontology, software testing knowledge, ontology based knowledge management system, knowledge sharing.