Improving Software Quality With Introspective Testing

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The long-term objective of my research program is to help industrial software engineers improve the quality and reliability of their software systems by providing them novel tools and techniques for analyzing and strengthening their test suites.******Software engineers have managed to build systems of incredible size and utility that play a crucial role in modern society; however, as these systems have grown in complexity, so has our expectations for the quality of these systems. This has resulted in increased scrutiny of software quality and intolerance for system failure; failures also have a direct economic cost, estimated at in excess of $60B per year.******Developers predominantly use software testing to confirm that their systems behave as they expect. Unfortunately, the tools and techniques software engineers have at their disposal for validating the 'strength' of their test suites are insufficient for modern software systems.******The research methodology employed in this program will include continual industrial involvement to ensure our approaches improve shortcomings in industrial practice and scale to the complexity of real software systems. The research program will produce novel techniques for characterizing the sensitivity of software tests, a means to assess test criticality by mapping test executions to real user executions, and mechanisms for assessing the severity of any identified faults. Finally, we will develop new ways to automatically strengthen tests that represent weaknesses in existing suites. Our approaches will be evaluated in both empirical lab studies and through validations with our industrial partners (which will comprise of both quantitative experiments and qualitative case studies).******Ultimately, the goal of this research program is to help software engineers assess and improve the quality of their test suites which will in turn lead to improved overall quality for the software systems we use every day.**