GMU Software Engineering Seminar
Series<http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~smalek/seminar.html>

Speaker: Lionel C. Briand

Title: Test Case Selection Strategies for Model-Based Testing: Search-based
Approaches and Industrial Case Study

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

Location: 4201, Engineering Building

Host: Jeff Offutt

Abstract:
Systems in all industry sectors increasingly rely on software for critical
and complex functions. Software dependability must be ensured through
verification and one of the most widespread and practical verification
techniques is testing, that is the systematic and controlled execution of
the system being verified. In recent years, Model-Based Testing (MBT) has
attracted an increasingly wide interest from industry and academia. MBT
allows automatic generation of a large and comprehensive set of test cases
from system models (e.g., state machines),
which leads to systematic system testing. However, even when using simple
test strategies, applying MBT in large industrial systems often leads to
generating large sets of test cases that cannot possibly be executed within
time and cost constraints. In this situation, test case selection techniques
must be employed to select a subset from the entire test suite such that the
selected subset conforms to available resources while maximizing fault
detection. In this talk, I will present the results of a comprehensive
investigation involving alternative selection strategies, that are based on
various heuristics and algorithms, and that attempt to maximize diversity or
coverage in test suites. Based on an industrial case study, we will also
estimate the potential benefits that can result from such test case
selection strategies.

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.


Sam Malek, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
George Mason University
WWW: http://cs.gmu.edu/~smalek/