CAREER: Cooperative Developer Testing with Test Intentions

该奖项是根据2009年《美国恢复和再投资法案》(Public Law 111-5)资助的。开发人员测试已被广泛认为是提高软件可靠性的重要且有价值的手段，部分原因是它能够在软件开发生命周期的早期暴露故障。然而，手动开发人员测试通常是乏味和不足的。测试工具可用于通过减少手动工作来实现资源的经济使用。为了最大限度地发挥开发人员测试的价值，开发人员和工具之间的合作非常需要有效和高效的支持，但缺乏最先进的研究和实践。这项研究旨在为合作开发人员测试创建一个系统的框架，提供实用的技术和工具，并提供一个集成的研究和教育计划。具体地说，这项研究涉及开发人员对测试意图的规范以将他们的测试目标或指导传达给工具、工具对测试意图的满意度以及工具对意图满意度的解释等基本研究问题。测试意图满意度及其解释不仅可以帮助开发人员完成测试任务，还可以帮助开发人员完成调试任务。该框架还有助于推断可能的测试意图，以减少指定测试意图时的手动工作。该项目的更广泛影响包括提高软件可靠性和与业界合作转让技术。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Developer testing has been widely recognized as an important and valuable means of improving software reliability, partly due to its capabilities of exposing faults early in the software development life cycle. However, manual developer testing is often tedious and insufficient. Testing tools can be used to enable economical use of resources by reducing manual effort. To maximize the value of developer testing, effective and efficient support for cooperation between developers and tools is greatly needed and yet lacking in state-of-the-art research and practice. This research aims to create a systematic framework for cooperative developer testing that provides practical techniques and tools, with an integrated research and education plan. In particular, the research addresses fundamental research questions around specification of test intentions by developers to communicate their testing goals or guidance to tools, satisfaction of test intentions by tools, and explanation of intention satisfaction by tools. Test-intention satisfaction and its explanation assist developers in accomplishing not only their testing tasks but also debugging tasks. The framework also helps infer likely test intentions to reduce manual effort in specification of test intentions. Among the broader impacts of the project includes improvement of software reliability and collaboration with industry to transfer technology.