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在现代社会中发挥关键作用的令人难以置信的规模和实用的系统；然而，随着这些系统的复杂性的增长，我们对这些系统的质量的期望也越来越高。这导致了对软件质量的更严格的审查和对系统故障的容忍；故障还会带来直接的经济成本，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运行符合他们的预期。不幸的是，软件工程师可用于验证其测试套件的“强度”的工具和技术不足以用于现代软件系统。*本计划中采用的研究方法将包括持续的行业参与，以确保我们的方法改进行业实践中的缺陷，并根据实际软件系统的复杂性进行扩展。该研究计划将产生表征软件测试敏感性的新技术，一种通过将测试执行与实际用户执行相对应来评估测试关键程度的方法，以及用于评估任何已识别故障的严重程度的机制。最后，我们将开发新的方法来自动加强代表现有套件中的弱点的测试。我们的方法将在经验性的实验室研究和与我们的工业合作伙伴的验证(将包括定量实验和定性案例研究)中进行评估。*最终，该研究计划的目标是帮助软件工程师评估和改进他们的测试套件的质量，这反过来将导致我们日常使用的软件系统的整体质量的提高。**

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.**