Although testing effort estimation is a very important task in software project management, it is rarely described in the literature. There are many difficulties in finding any useful methods or tools for this purpose. Solutions to many other problems related to testing effort calculation are published much more often. There is also no research focusing on both testing effort estimation and all related areas of software engineering. To fill this gap, we performed a systematic literature review on both questions. Although our primary objective was to find some tools or implementable metods for test effort estimation, we have quickly discovered many other interesting topics related to the main one. The main contribution of this work is the presentation of the testing effort estimation task in a very wide context, indicating the relations with other research fields. This systematic literature review presents a detailed overview of testing effort estimation task, including challenges and approaches to automating it and the solutions proposed in the literature. It also exhaustively investigates related research topics, classifying publications that can be found in connection to the testing effort according to seven criteria formulated on the basis of our research questions. We present here both synthesis of our finding and the deep analysis of the stated research problems.

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Place and transition refinements provide a convenient method of structuring complex net models by replacing single elements (places and transitions) at a 'higher-level' of abstraction with 'lower-level', more detailed, subnets. The concepts of static and dynamic place/transition refinements are introduced. Dynamic refinements do not increase the size of the (refined) model because no 'expansion' of the model is performed; instead, only a 'logical' association of higher-level elements with lower-level subnets is maintained and used in model analysis. Multiple applications of place/transition refinements results in hierarchical net models. The paper formalizes the concept of hierarchies of refinements in Petri nets and shows simple applications of the hierarchical approach to modeling of manufacturing cells.