| Title | : | Challenges in Automated Testing Beyond Test Generation. |
| Speaker | : | Ajitha Rajan (University of Edinburgh) |
| Details | : | Wed, 26 Dec, 2018 2:00 PM @ Ada Lovelace Hall (M |
| Abstract: | : | As the scale and complexity of software increases, the number of tests needed for effective validation becomes extremely large. Increasing numbers of tests present a challenge for both, test generation and test execution, that make up a large fraction of the overall testing cost. Automating test input generation to reduce cost has received a lot of attention in the literature. Reducing time and cost of test execution, on the other hand, has received little attention. Existing solutions in the literature reduce the total number of tests to be executed. This, however, can impact fault finding capability negatively. In this talk, I will focus on techniques to reduce test execution time while retaining its effectiveness in fault finding. We present two approaches for faster test suite execution - one that orders test executions in a test suite in such a way that instruction cache misses are reduced, and another that launches test executions automatically in parallel on GPU threads, without involving the end user. We present empirical evaluations with a large number of subject programs from industry standard benchmarks and examine the execution speedup achieved with the techniques. We discuss suitability of the techniques with respect to characteristics of the program and test suite. Speaker Bio: Dr.Ajitha Rajan is a Lecturer in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where she started in 2013 and was awarded the University Chancellor's Fellowship. Dr. Rajan's research interests are in the area of software testing and verification. She has worked on different aspects of test automation -- test input generation, monitoring and test adequacy measurement, test execution, and specified test oracles. Her work has been published at various international conferences in software engineering and testing. She received the ACM Distinguished Paper award at ICSE 2008. Dr. Rajan has served as a PC member in many prestigious academic conferences, including ICSE, ASE, ECOOP, FMCAD. She is also the Associate editor for IET Software Journal. Dr. Rajan has been awarded grants from EPSRC, GCHQ, Huawei, Facebook Research and SICSA. |
