seminar

Speaker: Preetham Vemasani

Title: Generating Test Data to Distinguish Conjunctive Queries without Comparisons

Date/Time: Thursday, 3/20/2014 @ 3pm

Location: 4801, Nguyen Engineering Building

Abstract: The widespread use of databases in software systems has increased the importance of unit testing the queries that form the interface to these databases. Mutation analysis is a powerful testing technique that has been adapted to test database queries. But each of the existing mutation approaches to testing database queries has one or more of the following shortcomings: inability to recognize equivalent mutants, inability to generate test databases automatically, or inability to apply to mutate all aspects of a query. In this paper we address all three of these challenges by adapting results from the rich literature on query rewriting. We restrict attention to the class of conjunctive queries without comparisons. In return for this restriction, we give an algorithm that recognizes equivalent mutants, generates a test database that distinguishes each nonequivalent mutant, and applies to arbitrary mutations, as long at the mutation is also a conjunctive query without

comparisons. The paper presents the test database generation algorithm and proves that it is sound and complete for conjunctive queries without comparisons. We then illustrate the algorithm on a sample query. We evaluate mutations of the query both with the new technique and compare the results to existing mutation techniques for databases.

Bio: Preetham Vemasani is a first year PhD student at George Mason University. He received the BS degree in Computer Science and Information Technology from JNTU Hyderabad, India and the MS degree in Software Engineering from George Mason University. His research interests are in software testing and databases. He is currently working on 'Generating efficient test data for database queries' with Dr. Paul Ammann and Dr. Alexander Brodsky.

Speaker: Bob Kurtz

Title: Mutation Subsumption Graphs

Date/Time: Thursday, 3/20/2014 @ 3pm

Location: 4801, Nguyen Engineering Building

Abstract: Mutation testing researchers have long known that many generated mutants are not needed. This paper develops a graph model to describe redundancy among mutations. We define “true” subsumption, a relation that practicing test engineers would like to have, but cannot due to issues of computability. We also define dynamic subsumption and static subsumption as approximations of “true” subsumption. We explore the properties of the approximate subsumption relations in the context of a small example. We suggest possible uses for subsumption graphs.

Bio: Bob Kurtz is a Senior Principal Engineer with Raytheon. Bob has more than 25 years of experience in developing software systems, with a focus on real-time embedded systems. Bob has a B.A. in Computer Science from the State University of New York Empire State College, and an M.S. in Software Engineering from George Mason University. Bob is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Software Engineering at George Mason University.

Speaker: Yuriy Brun

Title: What's wrong with the program I haven't written yet?

Date/Time: Friday, 2/21/2014 @ 11am

Location: 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building

Abstract: Software developers primarily rely on experience and intuition to make development decisions. I will describe speculative analysis, a new technique that helps developers make better decisions by informing them of the consequences of their likely actions. As a concrete example, I will consider collaborative development and the conflicts that arise when developers make changes in parallel. This is a serious problem. In industry, some companies hire developers solely to resolve conflicts. In open-source development, my historical analysis of over 140,000 versions of nine systems revealed that textual, compilation, and behavioral conflicts are frequent and persistent, posing a significant challenge to collaborative development. Speculative analysis can help solve this problem by informing developers early about potential and existing conflicts. Armed with this information, developers can prevent or more easily resolve the conflicts. I will demonstrate Crystal, a publicly available tool that detects such conflicts early and precisely. Crystal has inspired a collaboration with Microsoft and some Microsoft teams now use a version of the tool in their everyday work.

Bio: Yuriy Brun is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Yuriy's research interests are in software system modeling, design, and development. Previously, he served as a CI Fellow at the University of Washington, received his PhD degree in 2008 from the University of Southern California, as an Andrew Viterbi Fellow, and received his MEng degree in 2003 from MIT. He was recognized with the IEEE TCSC Young Achiever in Scalable Computing Award in 2013, and his doctoral research was a finalist in the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Competition in 2008. His work on speculative analysis, the subject of his talk, won a 2011 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award and was the spotlight paper in the October 2013 issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

http://cs.umass.edu/~brun

Speaker: Joshua Garcia

Title: Architectural Decay in Software Systems: Symptoms, Causes, and Remedies

Date/Time: Tuesday, 10/29/2013 @ 11am

Location: 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building

Abstract: Engineers frequently neglect to carefully consider the impact of their changes to a software system. As a result, the software system's architectural design eventually deviates from the original designers' intent and degrades through unplanned introduction of new and/or invalidation of existing design decisions. Architectural decay increases the cost of making new modifications and decreases a system's reliability, until engineers are no longer able to effectively evolve the system. At that point, the system's actual architecture may have to be recovered from the implementation artifacts, but this is a time-consuming and error-prone process, and leaves critical issues unresolved: the problems caused by architectural decay will likely be obfuscated by the system's many elements and their interrelationships, thus risking further decay. In this talk, I will focus on pinpointing locations in a software system's architecture that reflect architectural decay. I will discuss the reasons why that decay occurs.

Specifically, I will present an emerging catalog of commonly occurring symptoms of decay -- architectural "smells". I will illustrate the occurrence of smells identified in the process of recovering the architectures of several real-world systems. Finally, I will provide a comparative analysis of a number of automated techniques that aim to recover a system's architectural design from the system's implementation.

Bio: Joshua Garcia is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC). He is a member of the Software Architecture Research Group at the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at USC. His research interests include architectural decay, software-architecture recovery, distributed event-based systems, and self-adaptive systems. He has worked for a variety of organizations including the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC, and Xerox Special Information Systems.

Speaker: Yu Lei

Title: Combinatorial Testing-Based Fault Localization

Date/Time: Wednesday, 9/25/2013 @ 2pm

Location: 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building

Abstract: Combinatorial testing has been shown to be a very effective testing strategy. After a failure is detected by testing, the next task is fault localization, i.e., how to locate the fault that causes the failure. In this talk, I will discuss a fault localization approach we have developed that leverages the result of combinatorial testing. Our approach consists of two major steps. At the first step, we identify failure-inducing combinations in a combinatorial test set. A combination is failure-inducing if its existence causes a test to fail. Based on the execution result of a combinatorial test set, we produce a ranking of suspicious combinations in terms of their likelihood to be inducing. At the second step, we create a small group of tests from a given failure-inducing combination. In the group, one test is referred to as the core member, and it produces a failed execution. The other tests are referred to as the derived members which are similar to the core member but produce passed executions. The traces of these test executions are then analyzed to locate the faults. Experimental results show that our approach is very effective in that only a small number of additional tests are needed to locate the faults. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first effort to perform code-based fault localization based on combinatorial testing.

Bio: Yu Lei is currently an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Arlington. He was a Member of Technical Staff in Fujistu Network Communications, Inc. from 1998 to 2001. He obtained his PhD degree from North Carolina State University in 2002. His research interests are in the area of automated software analysis, testing and verification, with a special focus on combinatorial testing and concurrency testing. His current research is supported by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Speaker: Westley Weimer

Title: Adaptive Program Repair via Program Equivalence: A Duality With Mutation Testing

Date/Time: Wednesday, 6/5/2013 @ 11am

Location: 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building

Informal Abstract for Busy Grad Students:

Ever wondered how or why automated program repair works? In this talk we analyze why it is expensive, how we can be smarter up front to avoid those costs, and why it can profitably be viewed as the dual of a classic problem in software engineering. Stop by to hear about how these insights lead to an order-of-magnitude improvement.

Real Abstract:

Software bugs remain a compelling problem. Automated program repair is a promising approach for reducing cost, and many methods have recently demonstrated positive results. However, success on any particular bug is variable, as is the cost to find a repair. This talk focuses on generate-and-validate repair methods that enumerate candidate repairs and use test cases to define correct behavior. We formalize repair cost in terms of test executions, which dominate most test-based repair algorithms. Insights from this model lead to a novel deterministic repair algorithm that computes a patch quotient space with respect to an approximate semantic equivalence relation. Generate-and-validate program repair is shown to be a dual of mutation testing, directly suggesting possible cross-fertilization. Evaluating on 105 real-world bugs in programs totaling 5MLOC and involving 10,000 tests, our new algorithm requires an order-of-magnitude fewer test evaluations than the previous state-of-the-art and is over five times more efficient monetarily. This talk presents work that is currently under submission.

Bio: Westley Weimer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. His main research interest lies in advancing software quality by using both static and dynamic programming language approaches.

Speakers: Naeem Esfahani

Title: GuideArch: Guiding the Exploration of Architectural Solution Space Under Uncertainty

Date/Time: Thursday, 5/2/2013 @ 11:00am

Location: 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building

Abstract:

A system's early architectural decisions impact its properties (e.g., scalability, dependability) as well as stakeholder concerns (e.g., cost, time to delivery). Choices made early on are both difficult and costly to change, and thus it is paramount that the engineer gets them "right". This leads to a paradox, as in early design, the engineer is often forced to make these decisions under uncertainty, i.e., not knowing the precise impact of those decisions on the various concerns. How could the engineer make the "right" choices in such circumstances? This is precisely the question we have tackled in this talk. We present GuideArch, a framework aimed at quantitative exploration of the architectural solution space under uncertainty. It provides techniques founded on fuzzy math that help the engineer with making informed decisions.

This seminar is a practice for Naeem’s presentation of this work at ICSE 2013.

Bios:

Naeem Esfahani is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science Department, Volgenau School of Engineering. He got his B.Sc. degrees on Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Tehran in 2005. He also received a M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2008. His current research mainly focuses on Software Architecture, Self-Adaptive Software Systems, and Software Quality of Service Analysis & Improvement.

Speakers: Lin Deng

Title: Empirical Evaluation of the Statement Deletion Mutation Operator

Date/Time: Thursday, 3/7/2013 @ 10:00am

Location: 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building

Abstract:

Mutation analysis is widely considered to be an exceptionally effective criterion for designing tests. It is also widely considered to be expensive in terms of the number of test requirements and in the amount of execution needed to create a good test suite. This paper posits that simply deleting statements, implemented with the statement deletion (SDL) mutation operators in Mothra, is enough to get very good tests. A version of the SDL operator for Java was designed and implemented inside the muJava mutation system. The SDL operator was applied to 40 separate Java classes, tests were designed to kill the non-equivalent SDL mutants, and then run against all mutants.

Bios:

Lin Deng is a first year PhD student at George Mason University. He received the BS degree in Computer Science from Renmin University of China, and the MS degree in Computer and Information Science from Gannon University. He worked as a computer engineer at State Intellectual Property Office of China for four years before joining the MS program of Gannon University. His research interests are in software testing and security.

Speakers: Davide Falessi and Forrest Shull

Title: Applying Empirical Software Engineering to Software Architecture: Challenges and Lessons Learned

Date/Time: Thursday, 2/14/2013 @ 10:00am

Location: 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building

Abstract:

Software architecture community has developed numerous methods, techniques, and tools to support the architecture process (analysis, design, and review). Historically, most advances in software architecture have been driven by talented people and industrial experience, but there is now a growing need to systematically gather empirical evidence about the advantages or otherwise of tools and methods rather than just rely on promotional anecdotes or rhetoric. The aim of this presentation is to promote and facilitate the application of the empirical paradigm to software architecture. To this end, Davide Falessi will describe several challenges and lessons learned when assessing software architecture research that used controlled experiments, replications, expert opinion, systematic literature reviews, observational studies, and surveys. Before presenting scientific details, Forrest Shull will introduce the Fraunhofer Institute of Experimental Software Engineering, a not-for-profit applied research and technology transfer organization.

Bios:

Dr. Davide Falessi joined the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering in Maryland (CESE) in 2012 as a Research Scientist in the Measurement and Knowledge Management Division. He currently serves as a program committee member in several international conferences including ESEM, WICSA, ICSR, SEKE, PROFES, EASE, and MTD. His main research interest is in devising and empirically assessing scalable solutions for the development of complex software-intensive systems with a particular emphasis on architecture, requirements, and quality. He received the PhD and the “Laurea” degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Rome “TorVergata”.

Dr. Forrest Shull is a senior scientist at the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering in Maryland (CESE), a nonprofit research and tech transfer organization, where he leads the Measurement and Knowledge Management Division. At Fraunhofer CESE, he has been a lead researcher on projects for NASA's Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, the NASA Safety Center, the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and companies such as Motorola and Fujitsu Labs of America. He is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Software.

Speaker: Feras A. Batarseh

Title: Incremental Lifecycle Validation of Knowledge-Based Systems through CommonKADS

Date/Time: Friday, 11/30/2012 @ 11:00am

Location: 2901, Engineering Building

Abstract:

Validation is an essential phase in the development lifecycle of knowledge-based systems (KBS). Validation ensures that the system is valid, reliable and that it reflects the knowledge of the expert and meets the specifications. Although many validation methods have been introduced for knowledge-based systems, there is still a need for an incremental validation method based on a lifecycle model. MAVERICK is a novel validation method that aims to satisfy the mentioned goals. Lifecycle models provide a general framework for the developer and a mapping technique from the system to validation and verification. Such models support reusability, modularity and offer guidelines for knowledge engineers to achieve high quality systems. CommonKADS (a lifecycle approach) includes a set of models that helps to represent and analyze knowledge-based systems. It offers a de-facto standard for building knowledge-based systems. Additionally, CommonKADS is a knowledge representation-independent model. It has powerful models that can represent many domains. Defining an incremental validation method based on a conceptual lifecycle model (such as CommonKADS) has a number of advantages such as reducing time and effort, ease of implementation, well-structured design, and better tracking of errors when they occur. Moreover, the validation method introduced is based on case testing and selecting an appropriate set of test cases to validate the system. The intelligent validation method defined makes use of results of prior test cases in an incremental validation procedure. This facilitates defining a minimal set of test cases that provides complete and effective system coverage. CommonKADS doesn't define validation, verification or testing in any of its models. This research seeks to establish a direct relation between validation and lifecycle models, and introduces a validation method for AI systems (such as: KBS) embedded into CommonKADS.

Bio:

Feras A. Batarseh received the BSc degree in Computer Science from Princess Sumaya University for Technology (Amman, Jordan) in 2006. He received the MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Central Florida (Orlando, FL) in 2007 and 2011 respectively. His research interests include the field of software engineering, and to date his focus has spanned the areas of software testing, validation and verification, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and e-learning. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE computer societies.

Speaker: Kyle Canavera

Title: Mining the Execution History of a Software System to Infer the Best Time for its Adaptation.

Date/Time: Thursday, 11/8/2012 @ 10:30am

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Abstract:

An important challenge in dynamic adaptation of a software system is to prevent inconsistencies (failures) and disruptions in its operations during and after change. Several prior techniques have solved this problem with various tradeoffs. All of them, however, assume the availability of detailed component dependency models. This talk presents a complementary technique that solves this problem in settings where such models are either not available, difficult to build, or outdated due to the evolution of the software. Our approach first mines the execution history of a software system to infer a stochastic component dependency model, representing the probabilistic sequence of interactions among the system’s components. We then demonstrate how this model could be used at runtime to infer the “best time” for adaptation of the system’s components. We have thoroughly evaluated this research on a multi-user real world software system and

under varying conditions.

Bio:

Kyle Canavera is a student in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. Kyle's general research interests are in the fields of software engineering, data mining, and intellectual property law. Kyle received his BS degree in Computer Science from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Speaker: Nariman Mirzaei

Title: Testing Android Apps through Symbolic Execution

Date/Time: Thursday, 11/8/2012 @ 10:30am

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Abstract:

There is a growing need for automated testing techniques aimed at Android apps. A critical challenge is the systematic generation of test cases. One method of systematically generating test cases for Java programs is symbolic execution. But applying symbolic execution tools, such as Symbolic Pathfinder (SPF), to generate test cases for Android apps is challenged by the fact that Android apps run on Dalvik Virtual Machine (DVM) instead of JVM. In addition, Android apps are event driven and susceptible to path-divergence due to their reliance on an application development framework. This talks provides an overview of a two-pronged approach to alleviate these issues. First, we have developed a model of Android libraries in Java Pathfinder (JPF) to enable execution of Android apps in a way that addresses the issues of incompatibility with JVM and path-divergence. Second, we have leveraged program analysis techniques to correlate events with their handlers for automatically generating Android-specific drivers that simulate all valid events.

Bio:

Nariman is a Computer Science PhD student at George Mason University. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran in 2007 and then his M.S. Degree from Indiana University--Bloomington in 2009 and became a proud Hoosier. Nariman is currently working toward his dissertation proposal, focusing on test case generation for Android apps under the direction of Dr. Sam Malek.

Speaker: Yonghee Shin

Title: Using Traditional Fault Prediction Metrics as Indicators of Software Vulnerabilities

Date/Time: Tuesday, 9/18/2012 @ 11am

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Abstract:

According to the Digital Forensics Association, the cost of security breaches that occurred between 2005 to 2010 reached $139 billion. The National Institute of Standards & Technology reports that the annual cost of inadequate infrastructure for software testing is estimated between $22 and $60 billion. Considering limited resources in organizations, it is essential to prioritize software testing effort to the most problematic areas of code. If problematic code has measurable attributes that can be distinguished from non-problematic code, then those attributes can be used to prioritize software testing effort. This talk discusses results from empirical studies in which a set of software metrics were used as indicators of software vulnerabilities. It also highlights the challenges and opportunities of using software metrics to find vulnerable code locations.

Bio:

Yonghee Shin received the BS degree in computer science from Sookmyung Women’s University in Korea and the MS degree in computer science from Texas A&M University. She received the PhD degree in computer science from North Carolina State University. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at DePaul University and recently joined GMU as a postdoctoral researcher. Her research interests are in software testing and software metrics focusing on software security, and requirements traceability. Before she return to academia for her MS degree, she worked for Daewoo telecommunications and Samsung SDS in Korea for eight years.

Speaker: Eric Yuan

Title: A Taxonomy and Survey of Self-Protecting Software Systems

Date/Time: Friday, 5/25/2012 @ 11am

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Food: Pizza/Soda

Abstract:

Self-protecting software systems are a class of autonomic systems capable of detecting and mitigating security threats at runtime. They are growing in importance, as the stovepipe static methods of securing software systems have shown inadequate for the challenges posed by modern software systems. While existing research has made significant progress towards autonomic and adaptive security, gaps and challenges remain. In this paper, we report on an extensive study and analysis of the literature in this area. The crux of our contribution is a comprehensive taxonomy to classify and characterize research efforts in this arena. We also describe our experiences with applying the taxonomy to numerous existing approaches. This has shed light on several challenging issues and resulted in interesting observations that could guide the future research.

Bio:

Eric Yuan is a Ph.D. IT student in the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering at GMU. He received his bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Management Information Systems from Tsinghua University in China in 1993 and his M.S. degree in Systems Engineering from University of Virginia in 1996. He has over 15 years of professional experience in IT and management consulting in both commercial and public sectors. His current research interests include service oriented architectures, distributed computing, software

engineering, and information security.

Speaker: Riyadh Mahmood

Title: A Whitebox Approach for Automated Security Testing of Android Applications on the Cloud

Date/Time: Friday, 5/25/2012 @ 12pm

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Food: Pizza/Soda

Abstract:

By changing the way software is delivered to end users, markets for mobile apps create a false sense of security: apps are downloaded from a market that can potentially be regulated. In practice, this is far from truth and instead, there has been evidence that security is not one of the primary design tenets for the mobile app stores. Recent studies have indicated mobile markets are harboring apps that are either malicious or vulnerable leading to compromises of millions of devices. The key technical obstacle for the organizations overseeing these markets is the lack of practical and automated mechanisms to assess the security of mobile apps, given that thousands of apps are added and updated on a daily basis. In this seminar, we provide an overview of a multi-faceted project targeted at automatically testing the security and robustness of Android apps in a scalable manner. We describe an Android-specific program analysis technique capable of generating a large number of test cases for fuzzing an app, as well as a test bed that given the generated test cases, executes them in parallel on numerous emulated Androids running on the cloud.

Bio:

Riyadh Mahmood is a PhD student in the Computer Science department at George Mason University. Riyadh has been working in the software engineering / IT consulting field for over a decade. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and a Master’s degree in Information Technology from Virginia Tech. Riyadh is currently working on his dissertation proposal, focusing on security testing Android applications on the cloud.

Speaker: Mike Papadakis

Title: Using Mutants to Detect and Locate Bugs

Date/Time: Monday, 4/23/2012 @ 12pm

Location: 3507, Engineering Building

Food: Pizza/Soda

Abstract:

One of the most important challenges in software development is the detection and correction of software faults. Software testing and debugging techniques form the current practice for identifying, locating and fixing software defects. Both testing and debugging activities are among the most tedious tasks of software development which are usually performed by hand. Therefore, substantial benefits can be gained by the full or partial automation of these activities. Towards this direction, this talk will present emergent results of the use of mutation analysis in automating both testing and debugging. More precisely, automated techniques with respect to a) test case generation, b) test evaluation and c) fault localization will be presented in this talk.

Bio:

Mike Papadakis is a research associate at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of Luxembourg University. He received his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Athens University of Economics and Business (Greece). His research interests include software quality assurance and in particular, software testing, software debugging and mutation testing.

Speaker: Vinicius Durelli

Title: Toward Harnessing High-level Language Virtual Machines for Further Speeding up Weak Mutation Testing

Date/Time: Friday, 4/13/2012 @ 11am

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Abstract:

High-level language virtual machines (HLL VMs) are now widely used to implement high-level programming languages. To a certain extent, their widespread adoption is due to the software engineering benefits provided by these managed execution environments, for example, garbage collection (GC) and cross-platform portability. Although HLL VMs are widely used, most research has concentrated on high-end optimizations such as dynamic compilation and advanced GC techniques. Few efforts have focused on introducing features that automate or facilitate certain software engineering activities, including software testing. This research suggests that HLL VMs provide a reasonable basis for building an integrated software testing environment. As a proof-of-concept, we have augmented a Java virtual machine (JVM) to support weak mutation analysis. Our mutation-aware HLL VM capitalizes on the relationship between a program execution and the underlying managed execution environment, thereby speeding up the execution of the program under test and its associated mutants. To provide some evidence of the performance of our implementation, we conducted an experiment to compare the efficiency of our VM-based implementation with a strong mutation testing tool (muJava). Experimental results show that the VM-based implementation achieves speedups of as much as 89% in some cases.

Bio:

Vinicius Durelli is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at University of São Paulo, Brazil. He received his M.S.on Computer Science from Federal University of São Paulo in 2008. His research interests focus on Software Testing, High-level Language Virtual Machines, and Refactoring. Currently, he has been trying to retrofit software testing features into high-level language virtual machines.

Speaker: Marcio Delamaro

Title: Software Testing Research at ICMC

Date/Time: Wed, 4/11/2012 @ 11am

Location: 4801, Engineering Building

Abstract:

In this talk prof Delamaro will present the highlights of the research he and his group are developing at the Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação of the University of São Paulo, in Brazil. The themes addressed include techniques, criteria and tools for software testing in different domains such as embedded systems and virtual reality environments.

Bio:

Prof Marcio Delamaro has a Bachelor and a Masters degree in Computer Science and a Doctorate degree in Computational Physics. From 1997 he has been working as teacher and researcher in universities in Brazil. In 2000 visited the Politecnico di Milano in Italy for a one year pot-doc stage. Currently he is Associate Professor at Universidade de São Paulo, the larger and most prestigious university in Latin America. His area of interest is software testing.

Speaker: Bill Shelton

Title: Adding Criteria-Based Tests to Test Driven Development

Date/Time: Friday, 4/6/2012 @ 1:30pm

Location: 4801, Engineering Building

Abstract:

Test driven development (TDD) is the practice of writing unit tests before writing the source. TDD practitioners typically start with example-based unit tests to verify an understanding of the software’s intended functionality and to drive software design decisions. Hence, the typical role of test cases in TDD leans more towards specifying and documenting expected behavior, and less towards detecting faults. Conversely, traditional criteria-based test coverage ignores functionality in favor of tests that thoroughly exercise the software. This paper examines whether it is possible to combine both approaches. Specifically, can additional criteria-based tests improve the quality of TDD test suites without disrupting the TDD development process?

This paper presents the results of an observational study that generated additional criteria-based tests as part of a TDD exercise. The criterion was mutation analysis and the additional tests were designed to kill mutants not killed by the TDD tests. The additional unit tests found several software faults and other deficiencies in the software. Subsequent interviews with the programmers indicated that they welcomed the additional tests, and that the additional tests did not inhibit their productivity.

Bio:

William "Bill" Shelton is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering at GMU, currently focusing on applying software testing research to real world situations. He received his bachelor’s degree in Music from Berklee College of Music, Boston, MA., and his M.S. degree in Software Engineering from George Mason University. He is currently employed as a Sr. Software Engineer at the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau where his focus is, among many other software engineering tasks, test automation and continuous delivery.

Speaker: Nan Li

Title: Better Algorithms to Minimize the Cost of Test Paths

Date/Time: Friday, 4/6/2012 @ 1:30pm

Location: 4801, Engineering Building

Abstract:

Model-based testing creates tests from abstract models of the software. These models are often described as graphs, and test requirements are defined as subpaths in the graphs. As a step toward creating concrete tests, complete (test) paths that include the subpaths through the graph are generated. Each test path is then transformed into a test. If we can generate fewer and shorter test paths, the cost of testing can be reduced. The minimum cost test paths problem is finding the test paths that satisfy all test requirements with the minimum cost.

This paper presents new algorithms to solve the problem, and then presents data from an empirical comparison. The algorithms adapt approximation algorithms for the shortest superstring problem. The comparison is with an existing tool that uses a brute force approach to extend each subpath to a complete path. One new algorithm is based on the greedy set-covering algorithm and the other is based on finding a matching over a prefix graph. The comparison was performed on open software and showed that both new solutions generate fewer test paths than the brute force approach. The prefix-graph based solution takes much less time than the other two solutions when the number

of test requirements is large.

The paper has been accepted for ICST 2012 in Montreal, Canada. This seminar is a practice for Nan's conference presentation.

Bio:

Nan Li is a PhD student in Computer Science Department, Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering at GMU. He received his bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Beihang University in China in 2006 and his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2008. His current research mainly focuses on mutation testing, model-based testing and test automation.

Speaker: Naeem Esfahani

Title: Taming Uncertainty in Self-Adaptive Software

Date/Time: Tuesday, 2/28/2012 @ 12pm

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Food: Pizza/Soda

Abstract:

Self-adaptation endows a software system with the ability to satisfy certain objectives by automatically modifying its behavior. While many promising approaches for the construction of self-adaptive software systems have been developed, the majority of them ignore the uncertainty underlying the adaptation decisions. This has been one of the key obstacles to wide-spread adoption of self-adaption techniques in risk-averse real-world settings. In this talk, I describe an approach, called POssIbilistic SElfaDaptation (POISED), for tackling the challenge posed by uncertainty in making adaptation decisions. POISED builds on possibility theory to assess both the positive and negative consequences of uncertainty. It makes adaptation decisions that result in the best range of potential behavior.

Bio:

Speaker: Piazza Team

Title: A Tour of the Piazza Discussion Forums

Date/Time: Tuesday, 1/24/2012 @ 12pm

Location: Research Hall 163

Abstract:

Members of the Piazza team are visiting GMU on Tuesday, January 24 for a lunchtime seminar, with lunch provided. They will spend some time demonstrating the site, sharing best practices, and answering any questions.

Piazza is a free online gathering place where students can ask, answer, and explore 24/7, under the guidance of their instructors. Students as well as instructors can answer questions, fueling a healthy, collaborative discussion. Instructors can go into deeper detail on complex topics, and spot areas where students are struggling.

In SWE 432, we found that Piazza streamlined the teaching experience. All those hours spent responding to individual emails can now be put to better use. You will never have to answer the same question twice. Better yet, a student might answer it for you. On top of that, you always have complete editorial control over your class.

Most bulletin boards are organized top-down with the instructor creating and controlling all topics and threads. Piazza allows bottom-up organization by students, leading to a richer, more interactive, more collaborative, and more free learning experience. This leads to more participation from students and more learning by students.

You can read more about Piazza in this article from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/technology/04piazza.htm. Or you can see demos and sign up at http://www.piazza.com.

Speaker: Lima Beauvais

Title: Atomic Section Analysis Tool (AtSAT)

Date/Time: Friday, 1/20/2012 @ 12pm

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Abstract:

Testing the presentation layer of web applications requires novel methodologies. In general analyzing, modeling, and testing web applications and their three main layers creates challenges. However the testing techniques used for traditional software can be applied to the data computation and data representation layers. This talk discusses the Atomic Section Analysis Tool (AtSAT), which helps to mechanize the process of testing the presentation layer of web applications. AtSAT is based on the proposed framework of Offutt and Wu (2009) and automates seven of the nine steps; reducing the time to apply the methodology and minimizing human errors.

Bio:

Lima Beauvais earned an MS degree in Instructional Technology at Bloomsburg University, PA in June 2001. He is currently a candidate for the Engineer Degree at GMU, Fairfax, with a concentration on software testing. He worked as a Senior Multimedia Developer at PerformTech, Inc. from June 2001 to November 2007, developing computer-based and web-based courseware. He has been working as a Senior Software Engineer at Pal-Tech, Inc. since November 2007, developing web applications and training packages. He taught seminar classes on multimedia development at the Art Institute of Washington in Arlington, VA and Sanford Brown college in McLean, VA. He is a member of the Corporate Advisory Council (CAC) of the Institute of Interactive Technology at Bloomsburg University.

Speaker: Mohammad Abu Matar

Title: Variability Modeling and Meta-Modeling for Model Driven Service Oriented Architectures

Date/Time: Monday, 10/24/2011 @ 12pm

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Abstract:

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as an architectural style for distributed computing that promotes flexible deployment and reuse. One of the major benefits claimed for SOA is the flexible building of IT solutions that can react to changing business requirements quickly and economically. Services could be consumed by many applications that have different requirements. In addition, applications usually change by adding new requirements, removing existing requirements, or updating existing requirements. Thus, applications that consume the same service usually exhibit varying requirements. Varying requirements usually necessitate varying software architectures that satisfy the varying requirements of software applications. Thus, both requirements and architectures have intrinsic variability characteristics.

SOA development practices currently lack a systematic approach for managing variability in service requirements and architectures. This talk reports on research that addresses this gap by introducing a framework for managing variability in SOA in a systematic and unified way. The research introduces an approach to model SOA variability with a multiple-view service variability model and a corresponding meta-model. The research integrates Software Product Lines (SPL) concepts with the different service views using UML and SoaML. The research argues that the multiple-view service variability modeling approach facilitates variability modeling of service application families in a systematic and platform independent way. The key contributions of this research include: Multiple-View Service Variability Meta-Model, Multiple-View Service Variability Model, Consistency Checking and Mapping Rules, Model Driven Framework for Service-Oriented SPLs, Service Member Applications Derivation Rules, Explicit Modeling of Service Coordination Variability, and a prototype that realizes the introduced framework.

Bio:

Mohammad Abu Matar is a software engineering academic and practitioner with over 17 years of technical experience in teaching, research, management, architecture, systems engineering, training, software design and development. Mohammad has earned a BS in Electrical Engineering (Wright State University), an MS in Information Technology (Regis University), an MS in Software Engineering (George Mason University), and he is a PhD candidate in Software Engineering at George Mason University.

Mohammad’s specialty is the architecture of multi-tier distributed software systems with a special interest in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Mohammad is an Affiliate Adjunct Faculty at the MS in Software Engineering program of Regis University (Denver, Colorado). In addition, Mohammad has developed and delivered many technical corporate training sessions in software design, architecture, and SOA.

Speaker: Lionel C. Briand

Title: Useful Software Engineering Research: Leading a Double-Agent Life

Date/Time: Thursday, 9/29/2011 @ 12pm

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Abstract:

Though in essence an engineering discipline, software engineering research has always been struggling to demonstrate impact. This is reflected in part by the funding challenges that the discipline faces in many countries, the difficulties we have to attract industrial participants to our conferences, and the scarcity of papers reporting industrial case studies.

There are clear historical reasons for this, for example the fact that software engineering branched off from computer science and applied mathematics only a few decades ago. But we nevertheless need, as a community, to question our research paradigms and peer evaluation processes in order to improve the situation. We also need, as other engineering fields before us, to emancipate ourselves from the scientific disciplines we originate from. Engineering research is focused on innovation and impact on society, and is inherently very different from research in natural sciences or mathematics.

From a personal standpoint, relevance and impact are concerns that I have been struggling with for a long time, which eventually led me to leave a comfortable academic position and a research chair to work in industry-driven research. I will use—some people might say abuse—this keynote address to share my personal, and sometimes provocative reflections on the matter.

I will base my talk on concrete research project examples to convey why we need more inductive research, that is, research working from specific observations in real settings to broader generalizations and theories. Among other things, the examples will show how a more thorough understanding of practice and closer interactions with practitioners can profoundly influence the definition of research problems, and the development and evaluation of solutions to these problems. Furthermore, these examples will illustrate why, to a large extent, useful research is necessarily multidisciplinary to reach comprehensive solutions.

Such research paradigm has however a profound impact on how research is organized, conducted, and evaluated. I will therefore address issues regarding its implementation in our academic community and show how our own biases can make our research even more disconnected from reality, thus undermining our very own interests.

On a more humorous note, the title hints at the fact that being a scientist in software engineering and aiming at having impact on practice often entails leading two parallel careers and impersonate different roles to peers and partners.

Bio:

Lionel C. Briand is heading software verification and validation activities at Simula Research Laboratory, Norway, where he is leading the newly established Certus research center and projects in collaboration with industrial partners. He is also a professor at the University of Oslo (Norway). Before that, he was on the faculty of the department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he was full professor and held the Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Software Quality Engineering. He has also been the software quality engineering department head at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Germany, and worked as a research scientist for the Software Engineering Laboratory, a consortium of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CSC, and the University of Maryland, USA. Lionel has been on the program, steering, or organization committees of many international, IEEE and ACM conferences.

He is the coeditor-in-chief of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) and is a member of the editorial boards of Systems and Software Modeling (Springer) and Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability (Wiley). He was on the board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering from 2000 to 2004. Lionel was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for his work on the testing of object-oriented systems. His research interests include: model-driven development, testing and verification, search-based software engineering, and empirical software engineering.

Speaker: Jeff Offutt Slides

Title: Thoughts on Distance Education for the MS-SWE Program

Date/Time: Monday 3/28/2011 @ 12pm

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Abstract:

GMU has asked the MS-SWE program to offer more classes via distance education. This talk will offer experience-based analysis of the costs and benefits to students, the program, instructors, the department, and the university. The talk will introduce different "flavors" of DE and my base requirements of "students first." The talk will then discuss goals of DE, some of the effects using DE has on the class and the instructor, including specific habits that instructors must adopt or change to use DE effectively. The talk will end with survey results from students in SWE 642, recommendations for using DE effectively, and an answer to the question: "What would it take for the Software Engineering program to make full commitment to distance education?"

Bio:

Jeff Offutt is Professor of Software Engineering at GMU, where he leads the MS program in Software Engineering.

Speaker: Nan Li

Title: An Analysis of OO Mutation Operators

Date/Time: Monday 3/7/2011 @ 12pm

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Abstract:

This paper presents results from empirical studies using object-oriented, class-level mutation operators. Class mutation operators modify OO programming language features such as inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic binding and encapsulation. Most previous empirical studies of mutation operators used statement-level operators; this study asked questions about the static and dynamic nature of class-level mutation

operators. Results include statistics on the various types of mutants, how many are equivalent, new rules for avoiding creation of equivalent mutants, the difficulty of killing individual mutants, and the difficulty of killing mutants from the various operators. The paper draws conclusions about which mutation operators are more or less useful, leading to recommendations about how future OO mutation systems should be built. The paper has been accepted for Mutation 2011 in Berlin, Germany. This seminar is a practice for Nan's conference presentation.

Bio:

Nan Li is a PhD student in Computer Science Department, Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering. He received his bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Beihang University in China in 2006 and his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2008. His current research mainly focuses on mutation testing and model-based testing.

Speaker: Walid Taha

Title: Mathematical Equations as Executable Models of Mechanical Systems

Date/Time: Wed. 1/26/2011 @ 3pm

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Abstract:

[This talk is based on a paper presented at ICCPS 2010, Stockholm, Sweden.]

Cyber-physical systems comprise digital components that directly interact with a physical environment. Specifying the behavior desired of such systems requires analytical modeling of physical phenomena. Similarly, testing them requires simulation of continuous systems. While numerous tools support later stages of developing simulation codes, there is still a large gap between analytical modeling and building running simulators. This gap significantly impedes the ability of scientists and engineers to develop novel cyber-physical systems.

We propose bridging this gap by automating the mapping from analytical models to simulation codes. Focusing on mechanical systems as an

important class of physical systems, we study the form of analytical models that arise in this domain, along with the process by which domain experts map them to executable codes. We show that the key steps needed to automate this mapping are 1) a light-weight analysis to partially direct equations, 2) a binding-time analysis, and 3) symbolic differentiation. In addition to producing a prototype modeling environment, we highlight some limitations in the state of the art in tool support of simulation, and suggest ways in which some of these limitations could be overcome.

Bio:

Prof. Taha is a Professor of Computer Science at Halmstad University in Sweden, and holds and adjunct position at Rice University in Houston, TX. He is credited for developing the idea of multi-stage programming, and is the designer of several systems that develop this idea, including MetaOCaml, ConCoqtion, Java Mint, and the Verilog Preprocessor. He was also involved in the development of several other ideas, including statically typed macros, tag elimination, tagless staged interpreters, event-driven functional reactive programming (E-FRP), the notion of exact software design, and gradual typing. In 2010, Taha's publications had over 1,600 citations, and his h-index was 26. Taha was the principal investigator on a number of research awards and contracts from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Semi-conductor Research Consortium (SRC), and Texas Advanced Technology Program (ATP). He received an NSF CAREER award to develop Java Mint. He founded the ACM Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE), the IFIP Working Group on Program Generation (WG 2.11), and the Middle Earth Programming Languages Seminar (MEPLS). Taha chaired the 2009 IFIP Working Conference on Domain Specific Languages.