Title: Applying Math and CS for Systematic Software Testing

Abstract: How can we automatically generate objects that satisfy a given set of properties (within a bounded size)?  This question arises in various domains such as combinatorics (e.g., enumerate permutation of certain kind and size) or software testing (e.g., systematically generate tests). The standard approach to generating test suites, manual generation of the test inputs in the suite, is tedious and error-prone, especially for code that takes complex test inputs. This talk presents an approach that automates generation of test suites using test abstractions.  Conceptually, test abstractions provide a high-level description of desired test suites; testers need not manually write large suites of individual tests but instead write test abstractions from which tools automatically generate individual tests. This approach has helped testers in both academia and industry to discover numerous bugs.

Short Bio: Darko Marinov is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  His main research interests are in Software Engineering, especially improving software quality using software testing.  He has a lot of fun finding and preventing software bugs.  His work has been supported by Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NSF, Qualcomm, and Samsung.  More info is on his web page: http://mir.cs.illinois.edu/marinov