Improving Software Quality With Introspective Testing

我的研究计划的长期目标是通过为工业软件工程师提供新的工具和技术来分析和加强他们的测试套件，从而帮助他们提高软件系统的质量和可靠性。******软件工程师已经成功地建立了令人难以置信的规模和效用的系统，在现代社会中发挥着至关重要的作用；然而，随着这些系统变得越来越复杂，我们对这些系统质量的期望也越来越高。这导致了对软件质量的严格审查和对系统故障的不容忍；失败也有直接的经济成本，估计每年超过600亿美元。******开发人员主要使用软件测试来确认他们的系统按照他们的期望运行。不幸的是，软件工程师用来验证他们的测试套件的“强度”的工具和技术对于现代软件系统来说是不够的。******在这个项目中采用的研究方法将包括持续的工业参与，以确保我们的方法改善工业实践中的缺点，并扩展到真实软件系统的复杂性。该研究计划将产生新的技术来描述软件测试的敏感性，一种通过将测试执行映射到实际用户执行来评估测试临界性的方法，以及评估任何已识别错误严重性的机制。最后，我们将开发新的方法来自动加强现有套件中表示弱点的测试。我们的方法将在实证实验室研究和与我们的工业合作伙伴的验证中进行评估（这将包括定量实验和定性案例研究）。******最终，这项研究计划的目标是帮助软件工程师评估和提高他们的测试套件的质量，这将反过来提高我们每天使用的软件系统的整体质量

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.**