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.