seminar this Wednesday

[Darko Marinov]

Sarfraz Khurshid from UT Austin will visit us on Wednesday, July 26.
Below is the info for the talk he'll give.  If you'd like to meet with
him, please email Elaine Wilson (ewilson at ad.uiuc.edu) or myself to
schedule an appointment.

Darko

==============================================================

Time: Wednesday, July 26, 11am
Place: 2124 SC

           Automated Test Generation Using a Constraint Solver

                                   by
                             Sarfraz Khurshid
           Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
                    University of Texas at Austin

                                 Abstract

For programs that manipulate complex structures, generating a good test
suite is difficult and laborious.  This talk presents an approach for
generating a suite completely automatically.  The user needs to provide
only an invariant or precondition characterizing the acceptable inputs,
and a bound on input size.  A tool then generates a collection of
appropriate test cases, using a constraint solver as the underlying
engine.

The talk explains the details of this approach and describes experience
applying it to various problems, ranging from library code to stand-alone
applications.  Experiments on checking some methods from the Java
Collection Framework indicate that it is feasible to systematically
generate a high quality test suite.  The tool also uncovered previously
unknown errors in several applications: an intentional naming scheme
developed for the MIT Oxygen project, a constraint solver for first-order
relational logic, and a fault-tree analysis system developed for NASA.


Bio: Sarfraz Khurshid is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer
Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.  He received his PhD in
Computer Science at MIT in 2004.  He received a BSc in Mathematics and
Computer Science from Imperial College (London), and read Part III of the
Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College (Cambridge).  His current research
focuses on software testing, specification languages, code conformance,
model checking, and applications of heuristics in program analysis.