SHF: Small: Collaborative Research: Diversity and Feedback in Random Testing for Systems Software

测试是任何软件开发工作中极其重要的一部分，特别是对于可以访问敏感资源(个人信息、传感器数据等)的程序。而这可以通过互联网来实现。PI的工作将改善在开源Android平台上运行的移动应用程序的软件测试水平，从而减少错误并减少测试工作量。PI工作的基础是随机测试，即随机数被用作构建测试用例的算法的输入。尽管随机测试在发现复杂软件系统中的严重错误方面被证明是非常有效的，但它也受到各种问题的困扰，包括这样一个事实：如果不花大量时间反复研究相同的应用程序行为，那么很难设计一个随机测试程序。PI将建立在他们的“群体测试”工作的基础上，这已被证明是一种增加随机测试用例的多样性的廉价方式，并提高了它们在发现错误方面的有效性。此外，PI正在研究如何将随机测试与现代符号执行方法相结合，以及如何利用被测软件执行的反馈来提高随机测试的效率。开发更高效和有效的测试技术和工具将降低软件成本，提高软件质量。测试覆盖是一个具有挑战性的开放问题，这里正在以一种新的方式解决这个问题。

Testing is an extremely important part of any software development effort, especially for programs that have access to sensitive resources (personal information, sensor data, etc.) and that can be reached through the Internet. The PIs' work will improve the state of the art in software testing for mobile applications running on the open source Android platform, resulting in fewer bugs and reduced testing effort.The foundation of the PIs' work is random testing, where random numbers are used as inputs to an algorithm for constructing test cases. Although random testing has been shown to be highly effective for discovering serious bugs in complex software systems, it suffers from various problems including the fact that it is very difficult to engineer a random tester that doesn't spend a lot of time re-exploring the same application behaviors over and over again. The PIs will build upon their "swarm testing" work, which has been shown to be an inexpensive way to increase the diversity of random test cases, and also to increase their effectiveness in discovering bugs. Additionally, the PIs are investigating how to marry random testing with modern symbolic execution methods, and how to use feedback from executions of the software under test in order to improve the efficacy of random testing.The development of more efficient and effective testing techniques and tools will lower the cost and raise the quality of software. Test coverage is a challenging, open problem that is being addressed here in a novel way.