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Machiel van der Bijl On Automated Software Testing

Machiel van der Bijl

A few days ago, I ran a quick post on the announcement of Machiel van der Bijl’s work in automated software testing. I noted that I was impressed at the prospect and pretty much figured that was that.

As it turns out, though, more than a few software testers expressed their skepticism of this project on Twitter. Given the outpouring of response, I thought that some follow-up was in order.

So first I caught up with the researcher who developed this variety of automated testing, Machiel van der Bijl. He describes his automated process as “model-based testing” and recently defended his PhD dissertation on the subject.  He’s also started a company, Axini, to market his testing process.

What follows is a Q&A that he and I did over email over the past few days. I’ll be following up with other software professionals this week on the prospect of automated testing.


First off, tell me a little bit about yourself.  What’s your background and what got you into software testing?

I studied computer science at the Universiteit Twente between 1991 and 1996. I guess the advent of computers like the Commodore 64 and Amiga are to blame for that. During my studies I was heavily interested in Artificial Intelligence, things like neural nets, fuzzy logic, natural language processing. The first time that testing piqued my interest was during my graduation project at Brown University. I had written a neural net simulator and it contained bugs, quite annoying. At that time I did what most people would do: stiff debugging for nights in a row with a lot of print statements etc. But it all felt a bit cumbersome.

After my graduation I started working for a software consultancy firm where I learned a lot of stuff, from programming to project management. As a project manager I found out that software testing is ridiculously expensive. For example during system testing, the entire project team is waiting for the testers to finish. The testing is done mostly manually and takes quite some time. Even worse, when the testers find an error, and they mostly will, we have to do the whole cycle again: bug fixing and re-testing. I kept track of the time related to the testing phase and I was flabbergasted that something like 30 to 60 percent of software development costs are related to testing (or the lack thereof).

I was quite intrigued, specialized in testing and found out that it is a very hard problem. In fact I think that it is harder than programming.

When looking at how testing was/is done, I found two things that I wanted to improve: the first is the thoroughness of the test, and the second is the time it takes to develop and perform the test. Both are related to the fact that most of the testing (with the exception of unit testing) is done by hand. Therefore I started looking into test automation, which eventually led to model-based testing.

For the non-computer scientists out there, can you describe how Model Based Testing works and what distinguishes it from other forms of automated software testing?

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