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

这笔资金在犹他州立大学建立了一个新的CISE本科生研究经验（REU）站点。这个名为“bug Wars”的项目让学生们通过竞争和合作的方式研究软件测试和人工智能规划。该项目将创造关于基于用户会话的测试、基于模型的AI计划测试以及将这两种技术结合应用于web应用程序的新知识。该REU的一个新颖之处在于它既鼓励竞争又鼓励合作。学生们最初分成两个小组，努力找出被测网络应用系统中最多的错误。一个团队收集、减少并确定基于用户会话的测试套件的优先级。第二个团队使用机器学习来构建软件模型，并使用人工智能计划来生成测试套件。学生们通过考虑他们的测试套件的大小和故障检测的有效性来竞争展示他们的方法在相同系统上的优点。然后，学生们批判性地讨论他们的工作，并提出结合不同方法进一步提高效率的建议。这项研究更广泛的影响是，24名学生在三年的时间里有机会参与到一个鼓励他们攻读计算机科学研究生课程的支持性环境中。学生获得了基本的研究技能，包括研究问题的制定、实验设计、批判性评估、书面和口头沟通，为研究生院的学习做好了更好的准备。

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.