Advances in Coverage-Based Test Suite Reduction
Scott McMaster
University of Maryland, College Park
Friday, April 24, 2009 13:00-14:00,
Building 101, Lecture Room A
Gaithersburg
Friday, April 24, 2009 11:00-12:00,
Room 4550
Boulder
Abstract:
Modern software is increasingly developed using multi-language
implementations, large supporting libraries and frameworks, callbacks,
virtual function calls, reflection, multithreading, and object- and
aspect-oriented programming. The predominant example of such software is
the graphical user interface (GUI), which is used as a front-end to most of
today's software applications. The characteristics of GUIs and other modern
software present new challenges to software testing. Because recently
developed techniques for automated test case generation can generate more
tests than are practical to regularly execute, one important challenge is
test suite reduction. Test suite reduction seeks to decrease the size of a
test suite without overly compromising its original fault detection ability.
This talk will present research that advances the state-of-the-art in test
suite reduction by empirically studying a coverage criterion which considers
the context in which program concepts are covered. The novel feature of
this research is a technique based on the call stack coverage criterion
which addresses many of the challenges associated with coverage-based test
suite reduction in modern applications. Results show that reducing test
suites while maintaining call stack coverage yields good tradeoffs between
size reduction and fault detection effectiveness compared to traditional
techniques. This talk will present models, metrics, algorithms, and
techniques based upon this approach. Additionally, we will examine future
research directions in the areas of coverage criteria, test case
maintenance, and automated testing which will benefit the testing of
GUI-intensive applications as well as other classes of software.
Speaker Bio:
Scott McMaster received the B.S. degree in mathematics from the University
of Nebraska, Lincoln, in 1994, master's degree in software engineering from
Seattle University in 2001, and Ph.D. in computer science from the
University of Maryland, College Park, in 2008. He has extensive industrial
experience at startups as well as large companies including Microsoft,
Lockheed Martin, and Amazon.com. His research interests include software
testing, program analysis, software tools, and distributed systems.
Presentation Slides: PDF
Contact: R. N. KackerNote: Visitors from outside NIST must contact
Robin Bickel; (301) 975-3668;
at least 24 hours in advance.
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