Generating oracles with mutation testing and the crowd

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Gordon Fraser

DATE: Monday, July 02nd, 2012
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-006, Informatics building  (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 15:30

ABSTRACT:
Test data generation has made tremendous progress recently, and modern techniques can automatically generate inputs that reach almost any desirable statement in a program. However, the problem of finding good test oracles that determine when a test has found a bug remains, and cannot be completely automated. Today, the test oracle problem is one of the main issues that prohibits widespread adoption of automated testing techniques. Mutation testing is a useful technique to guide test generation; yet, its true power lies not only in the identification of good test data, but in the identification of good test oracles. In this talk I will discuss how mutation testing and crowd sourcing can serve to ease the oracle problem.

BIO:
Gordon Fraser is a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, UK. He was previously a post-doc researcher at Saarland University, and received a PhD in computer science from Graz University of Technology, Austria, in 2007. His research concerns the prevention, detection, and removal of defects in software. He develops techniques to generate test cases automatically, and to guide the tester in validating the output of tests by producing test oracles and specifications.

HOST: Prof. Mauro Pezzè