An empirical framework to applying unit testing in operational research

MELINA VIDONI; CUNICO, MARIA LAURA; A VECCHIETTI

Auckland

Conferencia; 48th International Conference on Computers and Industrial Engineering; 2018

CIE

Operational Research (OR) models usually deal with uncertain, changing requirements. This leads to a continuous process of adapting and reworking the mathematical code. However, there are scarce mechanisms to control its quality. This is essential to Software Engineering (SE) projects, as the maintainability quality has been acknowledged as vital for software development for decades. As one of many guarantees, SE enforces the use of Unit Testing: automatically running tests after any alterations, to assess specific parts of the code. This is done to discover where and how errors are happening, simplifying its correction while evaluating their possible ramifications. Considering that an OR model is a piece of software, this article aims to define how these concepts can be adapted to them, how tests should be used to detect faults and to provide a workflow to use them while developing an OR model. It provides guidelines on what should be tested and what to expect of possible errors and a process to use it.