CAREER: Cooperative Developer Testing with Test Intentions

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。开发人员测试被广泛认为是提高软件可靠性的一种重要且有价值的方法，部分原因是它能够在软件开发生命周期的早期暴露错误。然而，手工开发人员测试通常是乏味和不充分的。测试工具可以通过减少手工工作来实现资源的经济使用。为了最大化开发人员测试的价值，对开发人员和工具之间的合作的有效和高效的支持是非常需要的，但是在最先进的研究和实践中缺乏这种支持。本研究旨在为合作开发人员测试创建一个系统的框架，提供实用的技术和工具，以及一个综合的研究和教育计划。特别地，该研究解决了一些基本的研究问题，这些问题围绕着开发人员对测试意图的说明，以传达他们的测试目标或对工具的指导，通过工具对测试意图的满足，以及通过工具对意图满足的解释。测试意图满意及其解释不仅有助于开发人员完成测试任务，而且有助于调试任务。该框架还有助于推断可能的测试意图，以减少规范测试意图的手工工作。该项目的更广泛影响包括改进软件可靠性和与工业界合作转让技术。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Developer testing has been widely recognized as an important and valuable means of improving software reliability, partly due to its capabilities of exposing faults early in the software development life cycle. However, manual developer testing is often tedious and insufficient. Testing tools can be used to enable economical use of resources by reducing manual effort. To maximize the value of developer testing, effective and efficient support for cooperation between developers and tools is greatly needed and yet lacking in state-of-the-art research and practice. This research aims to create a systematic framework for cooperative developer testing that provides practical techniques and tools, with an integrated research and education plan. In particular, the research addresses fundamental research questions around specification of test intentions by developers to communicate their testing goals or guidance to tools, satisfaction of test intentions by tools, and explanation of intention satisfaction by tools. Test-intention satisfaction and its explanation assist developers in accomplishing not only their testing tasks but also debugging tasks. The framework also helps infer likely test intentions to reduce manual effort in specification of test intentions. Among the broader impacts of the project includes improvement of software reliability and collaboration with industry to transfer technology.