IRES Track I: U.S.-Czech Student Research Experience on Software Test Automation and Quality Assurance

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This IRES project will provide six U.S. undergraduate students with an eight-week summer research experience every year for three years in Brno, Czech Republic. The research experience will enable the students to gain new knowledge and skills related to testing, quality assurance, and code-inspection of distributed software systems used for large enterprises. The students will be mentored by internationally-renowned researchers in the field. The students? projects in the field of testing and quality assurance will be led by researchers from the Czech Technical University and experts from Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open-source enterprise software solutions. The student research and experiments will be performed at the Software Testing IntelLigent Lab at the Czech Technical University in Prague and at the Red Hat research facility located in Brno, Czech Republic. Students will gain complete knowledge of the test development cycle, modern testing toolkits, production-level development, and research skills. Students will research novel code-inspection techniques, further enabling knowledge in this field and boosting the capabilities of the U.S. software industry. The remote sites selected for the research experiences will provide students with a unique opportunity to work with an internationally-renowned research team that has extensive expertise in model-based testing. These experiences will enable the participating students to start their research or academic careers. The students will bring their new expertise and skills back to the U.S., leading to improved economic competitiveness in the field of distributed software systems, quality assurance and stronger partnerships between academia and industry.This project will provide computer science students with the opportunity to research novel code-inspection mechanisms for extracting module information and ensuring the proper functioning and interaction between all modules in a distributed software system. The research collaboration will involve Baylor University, the Czech Technical University in Prague, and industry partner Red Hat. Collaborators from the Czech Technical University in Prague specialize in test automation, experimental model-based testing, coverage optimization algorithms, and verification models. Red Hat is the market leader in open-source middleware and enterprise technologies, with unmatched expertise in production-level quality assurance and testing practice. Baylor University collaborators specialize in code inspection and code transformations. Interaction and collaboration of these three partnering groups will facilitate knowledge exchange and improvements of test automation and quality assurance of distributed systems. Student researchers will use existing open-source code-inspection tools and help develop and apply new ones. This IRES project will advance knowledge of code-inspection techniques to improve module testing and quality assurance processes in distributed systems. It will also help with the automation of model construction for model-based testing approaches that will lead to improved test generation, test coverage validation, verification of module information compliance, and more in this field. Student's individual open-source projects created during their research experience will directly contribute to improved testing and quality assurance in distributed software systems. The results will, in the end, help reduce efforts and costs related to testing and improve quality assurance of future software products, leading to fewer defects and bugs in products before customer release.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.