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

这笔资金在犹他州州立大学建立了一个新的本科生CISE研究经验（REU）网站。 这个名为Bug Wars的项目通过竞争和合作让学生们了解软件测试和AI规划的研究。 这个项目将创造新的知识，基于用户会话的测试，基于模型的测试与人工智能规划，以及这两种技术的结合应用于Web应用程序。 这种REU的一个新特点是它鼓励竞争和合作。学生们最初分成两个小组，努力在测试中找到Web应用程序系统中最多的错误。一个团队收集、减少和优先化基于用户会话的测试套件。第二个团队使用机器学习来构建软件模型，并使用人工智能规划来生成测试套件。学生们通过考虑测试套件的大小和故障检测效率，在相同的系统上竞争以展示他们的方法的优点。 然后，学生们批判性地讨论他们的工作，并建议结合不同的方法，以进一步提高效率。 这项研究的更广泛的影响是，24名学生在三年内有机会参加一个连续的环境，鼓励他们追求计算机科学的研究生学习。学生更好地为研究生院做好准备，因为他们获得基本的研究技能，包括研究问题的制定，实验设计，批判性评价以及书面和口头交流。

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.