Search-based testing reformulates testing goals as fitness functions so that test input generation can be automated by some chosen search based optimization algorithm. The optimization algorithm searches the space of potential inputs, seeking those that are `fit for purpose', guided by the fitness function. The last decade has witnessed a considerable increase in research in the area of applying search-based optimization methods to testing, including structural, functional, temporal and integration testing. This tutoral will give an overview of the the search-based testing approach, complete with some of the latest results and topics for further work in the area.

Biography

Phil McMinn has been a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, UK, since October 2006. He was awarded his PhD from Sheffield in January 2005, which was funded by DaimlerChrysler Research and Technology. He has published several papers in the field of search-based testing. His research interests cover software testing in general, program transformation and agent-based systems and modelling. He is currently funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) to work on testing agent-based systems and the automatic reverse engineering of state machine descriptions from software.

The tutorial will give a detailed overview of how to use JPF. This will include going through the download and installation process for obtaining the new version of JPF, that is now hosted at NASA instead of SourceForge. This first part of the presentation will be hands-on with many examples accompanying such topics as the new gui, runtime listeners, coverage trackers, partial-order reduction, etc. In the second part of the tutorial the focus will be on Symbolic PathFinder (SPF), i.e. the symbolic execution extension for JPF. In this part the theory and the current implementation of SPF will be described as well as a number of examples of how to use symbolic execution and in particular how to use it for test generation.

Biography

Corina Pasareanu, PhD, is a senior researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, in the Robust Software Engineering Group. She is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, the Silicon Valley campus. At Ames, she is investigating the use of abstraction and symbolic execution in the context of the Java PathFinder (JPF) model checker, with applications in test-case generation and error detection. She is also working on using learning techniques for automating assume-guarantee compositional verification. Together with her colleagues, she has developed Symbolic PathFinder, a symbolic execution tool for Java bytecode that is built on top of JPF. Symbolic PathFinder has been used at NASA, in academia and in industry. Corina is an Associate Editor for the ACM TOSEM Journal and she is the co-chair for the 26th International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (2011). Corina has published numerous articles in the areas of software engineering and formal methods and she has served on program committees for conferences such as ICSE, FSE, ISSTA, CAV, etc.

Willem Visser, PhD, is full professor and head of Computer Science at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Before joining Stellenbosch in 2009, he spent 8 years at NASA Ames Research Center, where he was the research lead for the Java PathFinder project. His research interests include, model checking, testing, and symbolic execution for test generation. He has been co-chair of ASE in 2008 and the ICSE Experience Report track in 2010 and has been a member of a large number of software engineering and formal methods conference program committees over the years, including currently, ASE, FASE, ICSE, ISSTA, SEFM, SPIN, RV and VSTTE.