"The design of genetic networks with specific functions is one of the major goals of synthetic biology. However, constructing biological devices that work "as required" remains challenging, while the cost of uncovering flawed designs experimentally is large. To address this issue, we propose a fully automated framework that allows the correctness of synthetic gene networks to be formally verified in silico from rich, high level functional specifications.
Given a device, we automatically construct a mathematical model from experimental data characterizing the parts it is composed of. The specific model structure guarantees that all experimental observations are captured and allows us to construct finite abstractions through polyhedral operations. The correctness of the model with respect to temporal logic specifications can then be verified automatically using methods inspired by model checking.
Overall, our procedure is conservative but it can filter through a large number of potential device designs and select few that satisfy the specification to be implemented and tested further experimentally. Illustrative examples of the application of our methods to the design of simple synthetic gene networks are included."

"In case you missed our last SF Selenium Meetup, check out video below of the two great presentations on mobile testing. Pete Hodgsen, a software consultant with Thoughtworks, discussed how to use Frank, a new testing framework he’s involved in developing, for automated acceptance testing of native iOS apps. Jason Huggins, creator of Selenium and co-founder of Sauce Labs, followed this by demoing how to test Android and iPhone applications using Selenium 2."

"If we think about tests as by-products of the development process, this investment is very hard to justify because it doesn’t give direct value to any of the project stakeholders. The stakeholders of the framework, however, aren’t the customers or the business users. They are the members of the development teams (and maintenance teams if separate). Many teams I interviewed have at some point ripped out the heart of their system and replaced it, or rewritten the entire system, while keeping their acceptance tests and using them to guide the whole effort. This is where the investment in live documentation really pays off. Such a framework is genuinely a separate product, with a different lifecycle and a different group of stakeholders."

"Minimalist acceptance testing on top of RSpec"

"describes the practice of shanghaiing another tool’s test suite to given your own TDD a jump start."

Developing web applications is getting more complex - it’s easy to accidentally break functionality as changes are made. This article describes a setup used to test apps as changes are committed; automatically notifying the developers of any problems.