Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Kashyap Maheshkumar Patel

Steve K Lim

Levent Ozgur

Taylor Paul Spangler

Timothy James Chapman

Xiaoyan Liu

Marc Mas Mezquita

The technology described herein provides an automated software-testing platform that uses reinforcement learning to discover how to perform tasks used in testing. The technology described herein is able to perform quality testing even when prescribed paths to completing tasks are not provided. The reinforcement-learning agent is not directly supervised to take actions in any given situation, but rather learns which sequences of actions generate the most rewards through the observed states and rewards from the environment. In the software-testing environment, the state can be user interface features and actions are interactions with user interface elements. The testing system may recognize when a sought after state is achieved by comparing a new state to a reward criteria.

Automated software testing with reinforcement learning

The technology described herein provides a cloud reinforcement-learning architecture that allows a single reinforcement-learning model to interact with multiple live software environments. The live software environments and the single reinforcement-learning model run in a distributed computing environment (e.g., cloud environment). The single reinforcement-learning model may run on a first computing device(s) with a graphical processing unit (GPU) to aid in training the single reinforcement-learning model. At a high level, the single reinforcement-learning model may receive state telemetry data from the multiple live environments. The single reinforcement-learning model selects an available action for each set of state telemetry data received and communicates the selection to appropriate the test agent. The test agent then facilitates completion of the action within the software instance being tested in the live environment. A reward is then determined for the action. The single reinforcement-learning model may then be trained.

Cloud architecture for reinforcement learning

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Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Kashyap Maheshkumar Patel