Using Ontology Patterns for Building a Reference Software Testing Ontology

Software testing is a critical process for achieving product quality. Its importance is more and more recognized, and there is a growing concern in improving the accomplishment of this process. In this context, Knowledge Management emerges as an important supporting tool. However, managing relevant knowledge to reuse is difficult and it requires some means to represent and to associate semantics to a large volume of test information. In order to address this problem, we have developed a Reference Ontology on Software Testing (ROost). ROost is built reusing ontology patterns from the Software Process Ontology Pattern Language (SP-OPL). In this paper, we discuss how ROost was developed, and present a fragment of Roost that concerns with software testing process, its activities, artifacts, and procedures.