Nikolai Knopp
Master Student

About me

I am a Master student and a member of the Saarland University Graduate School of Computer Science.
So far, I have touched various areas of Computer Science during my studies, including but not limited to computer graphics, operating systems, software engineering, testing and debugging and software analysis.
I will soon finish my Master thesis with the chair, which is titled "Dynamic mining of operational fair-CTL preconditions".

Research

I am interested in both static and dynamic software analysis and specification mining techniques.

In my Master thesis, I extract patterns of how objects in a program interact with each from observing actual program runs. These patterns can be used to create preconditions for certain method calls of the type "Before passing a List instance as first parameter to setProperties(List), it must have been the target of List.add(Object) at least twice.", and I asses their value for automatic bug detection techniques. Furthermore, I expect these patterns to be helpful for classification of program behaviour at runtime or as a source for automatically generated API documentation.

As my Bachelor thesis, I implemented jFTA, a static typestate verifier for Java bytecode. Working on my Bachelor thesis, limitations of both the typestate concept and static analysis became apparent to me. I also learned about the problems that most dynamic analysis techniques are facing. On the long run, I feel that the combination of static with dynamic analyses will be the way to go for practical, usable software tools.

Publications

• Automatically Generating Test Cases for Specification Mining
  by Valentin Dallmeier, Nikolai Knopp, Christoph Mallon, Gordon Fraser, Sebastian Hack, Andreas Zeller.
  Invited submission for best papers of ISSTA 2010, submitted for publication in IEEE TSE., December 2010.
• Generating Test Cases for Specification Mining
  by Valentin Dallmeier, Nikolai Knopp, Christoph Mallon, Sebastian Hack, Andreas Zeller.
  International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), Trento, July 2010.

You can find and download all my publications at the chair's publications page.

Contact

Feel free to contact me via email or phone (see above), or meet me in my office at the chair (first floor of building E1 1, room 1.10.2).

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