Automated Testing
Seminar - winter semester 2009

About the Seminar

In this seminar, we investigate methods, tools, and problems related to the automation of software testing, which ultimately leads to better and more efficient detection of bugs in software.

Place and Time

• Initial session: Tuesday, October 13,17:00 - 18:00, Building E 1.3, room 328.
• Regular meetings: Tuesday, 17:30 - 18:15, Building E 1.3, room 328.

Requirements for successful participation

• Prerequisites: This seminar is suitable for all students, bachelor's or master's, who are interested in software engineering and its applications. You don't need to have any prior knowledge regarding the subject, but participation in any other courses offered by the "Software Engineering" group could be helpful.
• Regular attendance: Attendance are mandatory. An official written note of absence is required if you are unable to attend.
• Seminar discussions: Each seminar session will consist of a discussion of two research papers. These papers will be announced in advance and all the seminar participants will be obliged to read at least one of them and take part in the discussion during the next session.
• Summaries: Weekly, a summary of the assigned and discussed during the previous session paper has to be submitted.
• Talk: In the last few sessions of the seminar, each participant will have to present a paper, that has the same or similar research topic to some of the papers discussed during the semester. Each presentation should last 20 to 25 minutes, allowing further 5 minutes for questions/discussions.

Language

The language for the seminar is english. Bachelor students may choose between German and English for their presentation, but discussions will be in English for all participants.

Discussion Papers (tentative)

27.10.2009: Fuzz testing:

B.P. Miller, G. Cooksey and F. Moore, "An Empirical Study of the Robustness of MacOS Applications Using Random Testing", First International Workshop on Random Testing, Portland, Maine, July 2006.

3.11.2009: Random testing:

Carlos Pacheco, Shuvendu K. Lahiri, Michael D. Ernst, and Thomas Ball, Feedback-directed random test generation, In ICSE '07: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, (Minneapolis, MN, USA), 2007

Related papers:

• Ciupa, I., Leitner, A., Oriol, M., and Meyer, B. 2008. ARTOO: adaptive random testing for object-oriented software. In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (Leipzig, Germany, May 10 - 18, 2008). ICSE '08. ACM, New York, NY, 71-80.
• Csallner, C. and Smaragdakis, Y. 2004. JCrasher: an automatic robustness tester for Java. Softw. Pract. Exper. 34, 11 (Sep. 2004), 1025-1050.

10.11.2009: Dynamic symbolic execution:

Sen, K., Marinov, D., and Agha, G. 2005. CUTE: a concolic unit testing engine for C. In Proceedings of the 10th European Software Engineering Conference Held Jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (Lisbon, Portugal, September 05 - 09, 2005). ESEC/FSE-13. ACM, New York, NY, 263-272

Related papers:

• Godefroid, P., Klarlund, N., and Sen, K. 2005. DART: directed automated random testing. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (Chicago, IL, USA, June 12 - 15, 2005). PLDI '05. ACM, New York, NY, 213-223.
• Majumdar, R. and Sen, K. 2007. Hybrid Concolic Testing. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (May 20 - 26, 2007). International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 416-426.

17.11.2009: Parametrized unit tests:

Tillmann, N. de Halleux, J.2008. Pex - White Box Test Generation for .NET, in International Conference on Tests And Proofs (TAP), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), n. 4966 (2008): 134-253

24.11.2009: Mutation testing:

Schuler, D., Dallmeier, V., and Zeller, A. 2009. Efficient mutation testing by checking invariant violations. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (Chicago, IL, USA, July 19 - 23, 2009). ISSTA '09. ACM, New York, NY, 69-80

1.12.2009: Mutation testing:

Yue Jia and Mark Harman. Constructing Subtle Faults Using Higher Order Mutation Testing, 8th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM'08), Beijing, China, 28th-29th September 2008. Pages 249-258.

8.12.2009: GUI testing:

Memon, A. M., Pollack, M. E., and Soffa, M. L. 2001. Hierarchical GUI Test Case Generation Using Automated Planning. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 27, 2 (Feb. 2001), 144-155.

15.12.2009: Search-based testing:

Pargas, Roy P. and Harrold, Mary Jean and Peck, Robert R. (1999) Test-data generation using genetic algorithms. Software Testing, Verification and Reliability. 9 (4), pp 263 - 282

5.1.2010: Specification-based testing:

Angelo Gargantini, Using Model Checking to Generate Fault Detecting Tests, in International Conference on Tests And Proofs (TAP), Zurich, Switzerland on 12-13 February 2007, vol. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), n. 4454 (2007): 189–206

12.1.2010: Testing timed systems:

Time-Optimal Real-Time Test Case Generation using UPPAAL . Anders Hessel, Kim G. Larsen, Brian Nielsen, Paul Pettersson, and Arne Skou. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Testing of Software (FATES'03), 2003.

19.1.2010: Formal testing:

Jard, C. and Jéron, T. 2005. TGV: theory, principles and algorithms: A tool for the automatic synthesis of conformance test cases for non-deterministic reactive systems. Int. J. Softw. Tools Technol. Transf. 7, 4 (Aug. 2005), 297-315.

Background papers:

• Tretmans, J. 1999. Testing Concurrent Systems: A Formal Approach. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Concurrency theory (August 24 - 27, 1999). J. C. Baeten and S. Mauw, Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 1664. Springer-Verlag, London, 46-65.

26.1.2010: Testability transformation:

M. Harman, L. Hu, R. M. Hierons, J. Wegener, H. Sthamer, A. Baresel, and M. Roper, 2004, Testability Transformation, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 30 1, pp. 3-16.

2.1.2010: TBA

Seminar Registration

To register for this seminar just send an email to automated_testing09@st.cs.uni-saarland.de. Please note that the places for the seminar are limited to 13 students and they will be distributed based on the "first-come, first-served" policy.

Contact

• Gordon Fraser
• Andreas Zeller

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