Cooperative Testing and Analysis: Human-Tool, Tool-Tool, and Human-Human Cooperations to Get Work Done
Keynote Speaker: Tao Xie, North Carolina State University
Abstract:
Tool automation to reduce manual effort has been an active research area in various subfields of software engineering such as software testing and analysis. To maximize the value of software testing and analysis, effective support for cooperation between engineers and tools is greatly needed and yet lacking in state-of-the-art research and practice. In particular, testing and analysis practice is in a great need of (1) effective ways for engineers to communicate their testing/analysis goals and guidance to tools and (2) tools with strong enough capabilities to accomplish the given testing/analysis goals and with effective ways to communicate challenges faced by them to engineers -- enabling a feedback loop between engineers and tools to refine and accomplish the testing/analysis goals. In addition, different tools have their respective strengths and weaknesses, and there is also a great need of allowing these tools to cooperate with each other. Similarly, there is a great need of allowing engineers (or even users) to cooperate to help tools such as in the form of crowdsourcing. A new research frontier on synergistic cooperations between human and tools, tools and tools, and human and human is yet to be explored. We have recently proposed the methodology of cooperative developer testing as initial work in this direction (e.g., Covana described in an ICSE 2011 paper). This talk presents recent advances and future trends towards cooperative testing and analysis.
Short Biography of the Speaker:
Tao Xie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2005, advised by David Notkin. He has worked as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond and Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests are in software engineering, including software testing, analysis, and analytics. He has served as the ACM SIGSOFT History Liaison in the SIGSOFT Executive Committee as well as a member of the ACM History Committee. He received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2009. He received a 2011 Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) Award, 2008, 2009, and 2010 IBM Faculty Awards, and a 2008 IBM Jazz Innovation Award. He received the ASE 2009 Best Paper Award and an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. He was Program Co-Chair of ICSM 2009 and MSR 2011/2012. His homepage is at http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/xie/.