Revision as of 15:45, 11 January 2017

7th Halmstad Summer School on Testing, HSST 2016

Organized in cooperation with TOCSYC Network

June 12-15, 2017 - Halmstad University, Sweden

Introduction

Testing and debugging account for a major part of software development cost and effort, yet the current practice of software testing is often insufficiently structured and disciplined. There have been various attempts in the past decades to bring more rigour and structure into this field, resulting in several industrial-strength processes, techniques and tools for different levels of testing. The 5th Halmstad Summer School on Testing provides an overview of the state of the art in testing, including theory, industrial cases, tools and hands-on tutorials by internationally-renowned researchers.

Tutorials

Georgios Fainekos, Arizona State University, USA

Marie-Claude Gaudel, Université de Paris-Sud, France

TSTL: a Little (Integrated) Language for Testing, Alex Groce, Northern Arizona University, USA

TSTL (the Template Scripting Testing Language) is a "little language" (domain-specific language) for describing valid tests and correctness properties for Python programs. While TSTL can be used like other testing tools, both academic and industrial, as an off-the-shelf test generator, the core idea of TSTL is to offer, in place of a monolithic tool, an interface to testing as a language extension. This approach makes testing not a separate activity to be performed using a tool, but as natural to users of the language of the system under test as is the use of domain-specific libraries such as ArcPy, NLTK, or QIIME, in their domains (GIS, numeric analysis, natural language processinng, bioinformatics). TSTL is a language and tool infrastructure, but is also a way to bring testing activities under the control of an existing programming language in a simple, natural way. In this talk, I will present the basic ideas of TSTL as well as a tutorial on using TSTL for rapid prototyping of new automated testing and debugging techniques.

Justyna Petke, University College London, UK

Franz Wotawa, Graz University of Technology, Austria

Fuzzing with Inferred Grammars, Andreas Zeller, Saarland University, Germany

Large-scale random testing, also known as “Fuzzing”, is a cheap and fully automated technique to check programs for robustness. Effective fuzzing, however, requires the ability to create mostly valid inputs, because syntactically invalid inputs would be rejected by the program, never reaching the features one would like to test. In our previous LANGFUZZ work, we have shown how a given grammar greatly improves fuzzing effectiveness; LANGFUZZ is now the standard testing tool for Mozilla Firefox and hans found more than 4,000 bugs. Recent advances in grammar inference allow these techniques to be automatically deployed for arbitrary programs. In this tutorial, I will give a hands-on tutorial on how to fuzz, how to fuzz with grammars, and teach how to infer grammars automatically.

Registration

The registration deadline is April 15, 2017.

Registration link will be available in March 2017. If you have any dietary requirements, or would like to attend only certain days, please indicate it in the registration form. After submitting the registration form, please use the PayPal page for payment. Upon concluding the payment process, you will receive a confirmation.

The registration fee is 3000 SEK (approx. 325 EUR, ) and covers lunches, coffee breaks, and the study material but does not include the social event and dinner. The ticket to the social event and dinner (excl. drinks) costs 500 SEK and can be included upon registration. The registration fees include Value Added Tax and is hence, VAT deductible for governmental organizations.

Ph.D. Student Presentations

We have 6 time slots for Ph.D. presentations, where each student has 10 minutes to present her/his research project (and possibly results) and receive feedback from our experts. We solicit abstracts of 2 pages in the EasyChair Style in order to make a selection. The abstract should be solely authored by the Ph.D. student, but reviewed and approved by her/his supervisors.

The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2017.

Venue

The summer school will be held on the campus of Halmstad University in Halmstad, Sweden. Halmstad is a popular holiday destination located on the Swedish west coast. Just a few minutes by bicycle or bus takes you from campus to city centre, sandy beaches or forested Galgberget Hill.

Directions to/in Campus

Directions for getting to campus can be found at http://www.hh.se/english/abouttheuniversity/visitus.307_en.html

The campus map can be found here. The summer school will be located at the O 124 lecture hall, which is located at the ground floor of the O building (O Huset). Coffee breaks will be held at the same building. Lunches will be served in the ground floor of the Spiro restaurant in the G building.

Directions to Halmstad

Trains take you directly to Göteborg in about 1 hour, to the Malmö-Copenhagen area in about 2 hours and to Stockholm in 4.5 hours. There are also daily flights from Halmstad Airport to Stockholm.

If you are flying internationally it is generally easiest to fly into Copenhagen (CPH) airport (also known as Kastrup). The best thing about flying into CPH is that you just buy a train ticket when you arrive at the airport and simply take a train from the airport directly to Halmstad. The train leaves from the airport itself approximately once an hour on weekdays. We recommend that you check the time-table at the Swedish Railways site and allow one hour from touchdown to getting to the train station (just outside customs). (It seems that you can take an earlier or a later train on the same day regardless of the exact train you booked, but obviously you will lose your seat reservation if you have made one.) To get to your hotel, you can combine a taxi booking with your train ticket at the Swedish Railways site and a driver will wait for you with your name mentioned on a board once you arrive in Halmstad.

In Halmstad, everything is either in walking distance or a short taxi ride away. Usually there are taxis at the station. If there are none there is a phone that connects directly to the local taxi company. For the eventuality that the phone is not working, it is good to have a cell phone handy. The number for the taxi company is written on the phone.

Note that CPH is in Denmark (and not in Sweden). So, if you need visas for European countries, make sure you get one that works for both.

If for some reason you cannot or do not want to use CPH, the next best international airport is in Gothenburg (GOT), locally known as Landvetter. The tricky thing about using that airport is that you would first have to take a 45 minute shuttle from the airport to the Gothenburg train station, and then take the train to Halmstad. That is one transfer and one wait. You can buy a combined shuttle and train ticket from the the Swedish Railways site.

Accommodation

We have made a pre-booking for a group of rooms at Hotel Continental. The negotiated price is 825 SEK for a single room, 1025 SEK for a double room and 591 SEK for a shared double room. All prices include breakfast.

If you would like to use this offer, please send an email to the hotel reservation and mention the booking code "Summer School 2016".

Here are some other suggestions for the accommodation, with an indication of their price range, (obtained from booking.com) and their distance to the summer school venue

• Scandic Hallandia (~160-200 EUR / night, 2km)
• Hotel Amadeus (~100-120 EUR / night, 2.5km)
• First Hotel Martenson (~130-150 EUR / night, 2km)
• Quality Hotel Halmstad (~80-100 EUR / night, 3 km)
• STF Halmstads Hostel Kaptenshamn (~80-100 EUR / night, 2km)

An annotated Google Map with suggestion for restaurants can be found here.

History

This is the sixth edition of the summer school. Information about the previous editions is provided below.

• HSST 2016 (June 13- June 16, 2015),
• HSST 2015 (June 8- June 11, 2015),
• HSST 2014 (June 9- June 12, 2014),
• HSST 2013 (June 3- June 5, 2013),
• Second Summer School on Accurate Programming (May 30 - June 1, 2012)

Organizers

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or enquiries:

• Stella Erlandsson (Local Organization, stella.erlandsson@hh.se)
• Veronica Gaspes (Organization Chair, veronica.gaspes@hh.se)
• Mohammad Mousavi (Program Co-Chair, m.r.mousavi@hh.se)
• Richard Torkar (Program Co-Chair, richard.torkar@cse.gu.se)