Because of several vulnerabilities in software products and high amount of damage caused by them, software developers are enforced to produce more secure systems. Software grows up through its life cycle, so software development methodologies should pay special attention to security aspects of the product. This paper focuses on agile methodologies in order to equip them with security activities. We can restrain reduction of agile nature of organization's current process by means of agility measurement and applying an efficient activity integration algorithm with a tunable parameter named agility reduction tolerance (ART). Using this approach, method engineer of the project can enhance his agile software development process with security features to increase product's trustworthiness.

Context: During the development process of a software program, regression testing is used to ensure that the correct behavior of the software is retained after updates to the source code. This regression testing becomes costly over time as the number of test cases increases and it makes sense to prioritize test cases in order to execute fault-detecting test cases as soon as possible. There are many coverage-based test case prioritization (TCP) methods that only use the code coverage data to prioritize test cases. By incorporating the fault-proneness estimations of code units into the coverage-based TCP methods, we can improve such techniques.Objective: In this paper, we aim to propose an approach which improves coverage-based TCP methods by considering the fault-proneness distribution over code units. Further, we present the results of an empirical study that shows using our proposed approach significantly improves the additional strategy, which is a widely used coverage-based TCP method.Method: The approach presented in this study uses the bug history of the software in order to introduce a defect prediction method to learn a neural network model. This model is then used to estimate fault-proneness of each area of the source code and then the estimations are incorporated into coverage-based TCP methods. Our proposed approach is a general idea that can be applied to many coverage-based methods, such as the additional and total TCP methods.Results: The proposed methods are evaluated on datasets collected from the development history of five real-world projects including 357 versions in total. The experiments show that using an appropriate bug history can improve coverage-based TCP methods.Conclusion: The proposed approach can be applied to various coverage-based TCP methods and the experiments show that it can improve these methods by incorporating estimations of code units fault-proneness.

The increase in complexity and rate of technological changes in modern software development has led to a demand for systematic methods that raise the abstraction level for system maintenance and regression testing. Model‐driven development (MDD) has promised to reduce extra coding efforts in software maintenance activities using traceable change management. The research described in this paper presents a Z‐notation‐based framework, called delta‐based regression testing (DbRT), for formal modeling of regression testing in the context of MDD. The framework proposes to propagate the changes from a software specification to testing artifacts in order to preserve consistency after system evolution. Also, an effective delta‐based selection technique is provided for regression testing at the platform‐independent level. The framework is further enriched by introducing a new category of coverage patterns for DbRT. Complex coverage patterns can be defined using a declarative query language syntax for examining the adequacy of regression testing. Finally, an implementation technique and an analysis plan are provided to assess the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The assessment process is expected to be beneficial to both the platform‐independent and platform‐specific level of DbRT by identifying the desired coverage according to available testing resources. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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