REU Site: Bug Wars: A Collaborative Software Testing Research Experience for Undergraduates

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This funding establishes a new CISE Research Experiences for Undergraduates(REU) site at Utah State University. The project, calledBug Wars, exposes students to research on software testing and AIplanning through both competition and collaboration. This project willcreate new knowledge about user-session-based testing, model-basedtesting with AI planning, and the combination of these two techniquesas applied to web applications. A novel feature of this REU is thatit encourages both competition and collaboration. The students initiallysplit into two teams that strive to find the most faults in web applicationsystems under test. One team collects, reduces, and prioritizesuser-session-based test suites. A second team uses machine learning tobuild models of the software and AI planning to generate test suites.Students compete to show the merits of their approach on the same systemsby considering the sizes and fault detection effectiveness of theirtest suites. The students then critically discuss their work and proposecombining the different approaches to further improve effectiveness. The broader impacts of this research are that twenty-four students over athree-year period have the opportunity to participate in a supportiveenvironment that encourages them to pursue graduate studies in ComputerScience. The students are better prepared for graduate school as they gainbasic research skills, including the formulation of research questions,design of experiments, critical evaluation, and written and oralcommunication.