1. Introduction
With the arrival of the age of knowledge economy, the importance of knowledge management that has become a hot spot in international manage fields is more obvious. In order to enhance its competi-tive power, many enterprises have initia- tively taken knowledge management into their core business process, which drives the development of consultation business whose new business scope is knowledge management, and then a lot of software tools and systems about knowledge man- agement have been developed by IT en- terprise. Magazines and websites which are relative to knowledge management are largely spring up.
The essence of knowledge management is a problem about management, but at last the functions and services of knowledge management are implemented by knowl- edge management technology. So, many enterprises have difficulties in executing knowledge management effectively with- out the support of knowledge manage- ment, because it is the foundation to con- struct knowledge management system, and the driving force to implement knowledge management[1].
Broadly, knowledge management tech- nology isn’t limited to IT, but modern in- formation technology is the premise to implement knowledge management effec- tively. For more than ten years of study- ing knowledge management, many knowledge management IT tools are emerged in commercial market, but not all of them are combined with particular requirement of enterprise, especially in particular fields, the discrepancy between them is highlighted[2].
Software testing is a knowledge-based activity, testing staff are belong to knowl- edge workers, they test software accord- ing to testing plans, but relative knowl- edge, skills, experiences and inspiration are important to the testing process, if they have no open thoughts, abundant testing experiences and skills, the testing quality can’t be assured[3]. In addition, developing technology and continually recurring software that will be tested make software testing staff stressed out and prostrated. They have urgent re- quirements in searching for new testing knowledge and technologies, and that knowledge management offers a new idea and a new method of solving problems for us, but software testing has distin- guishing features, although existing mul- tipurpose knowledge management theo- ries and technologies have more or less dealt with many problems, we even more need theories and technologies combined with our field tightly, to survey and de- liberate on our problems again, which can help us find an effective method of solv- ing problems[4].
2. Related works
At present, knowledge management in the field of software testing is researched seldomly at home and abroad, until now, an example of knowledge management in software testing has not been found. At home research on knowledge manage- ment is the latecomer, at the same time, there are little enterprises specializing in software testing, knowledge management has been just executed in testing.
So far, the research and examples of knowledge management in software test- ing at abroad have not been found, but multipurpose knowledge management in many fields have been researched for many years, such as IBM, Microsoft. They put in enough money and man- power to research knowledge manage- ment, put forward to a suite of theory and developed many software products.
In addition, relative research of knowl- edge management has been done in soft- ware engineering at abroad, a lot of pa- pers have been published and a series of software tools have been developed. Now, KBSE (Knowledge-Based Software En- gineering Conference) is held annually, at which the latest advance of the knowl- edge management in software testing is discussed[5]. In fact, research of knowl- edge management in software testing is an IT problem that the knowledge man- agement ideas are implemented in soft- ware testing, that is, a software platform should be developed to support knowl- edge management activities in software testing. According to the research made by Gallupe in 2000 who studied plat- forms, theories and examples of existing knowledge management system, there are many difficulties in implementing knowl- edge acquisition, coding, storage and searching effectively in existing knowl- edge management platform[6].
3. Major problems
According to the working experiences acquired from many software testing pro- jects in BUAA, the author analyzed the testing process of major software with the primary principles of knowledge man- agement, and found that five existing problems in software testing process are: 1.Low ratio of reusing software testing knowledge. At present, the public testing knowledge in software testing process have not been accumulated consciously, although there are some databases about testing knowledge and experiences within business, most staff neglect them, which causes testing knowledge disused and leads to the low rate of testing knowledge and experience.