Revision as of 19:38, 28 November 2014

5th Halmstad Summer School on Testing, HSST 2015

June 8-11, 2015 - 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 4th 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

Automated Fault Prediction: The Ins, The Outs, The Ups, The Downs, Elaine Weyuker

It would obviously be very valuable to know in advance which files in the next release of a large software system are most likely to contain the largest numbers of defects. To accomplish this, we developed a negative binomial regression model and used it to predict the expected number of bugs in each file of the next release of a software system. The predictions are based on code characteristics and bug and modification history data. We will discuss what we have learned from applying the model to make predictions for 170 releases of nine large industrial systems, each with multiple years of field exposure, and tell you about our success in making these predictions. We will also describe our automated tool, and discuss some of the lessons learned and issues that had to be dealt with.

Although our Standard Model for fault prediction has performed very well for predicting fault-prone files, we have investigated several additions to the standard set of predictor variables. We built models that included the following variations:

• calling structure of the software system
• counts of the number of developers involved with the software
• fine-grained counts of changes made to the software.

We will describe these variations and their impact on the prediction results, as well as an attempt to assess the influence of individual programmers on the fault-proneness of files.

This is joint work with Thomas Ostrand.

Speakers

Rance Cleaveland

Byron Cook

Karl Meinke

Brian Nielsen

Ina Schaefer

Elaine Weyuker

Elaine Weyuker is a Visiting Professor Mälardalen University in Västerås, Sweden and an independent researcher and consultant. Previously, she worked as a Fellow and Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Labs, a Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, a Lecturer at the City University of New York, a Systems Engineer at IBM, and a programmer at Texaco. Her research focuses on empirical software engineering and techniques to build highly reliable and dependable software. Much of her recent research involved designing techniques, building statistical models and developing a tool to automatically predict which files of large industrial software systems are most likely to contain bugs, for which she holds a patent.

She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Fellow and an AT&T Fellow. She is the author of 170 refereed publications as well as several books and book chapters. Among her awards are the 2012 US President's volunteer service award, the 2010 ACM President's Award, the 2008 Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award for Outstanding Research and Technical Leadership, the 2007 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award, the 2004 IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills Award, the Rutgers University 50th Anniversary Outstanding Alumni Award, the 2001 YWCA Woman of Achievement Award, and the 2004 AT&T Chairman's Diversity Award. She served as the chair of the ACM Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) from 2004 - 2012 and has been a member of the Coalition to Diversify Computing's Executive Committee for many years.

Registration

The registration deadline is April 15, 2015.

To apply to the summer school, please send an email to Veronica.Gaspes@hh.se with "Halmstad Summer School on Testing" in the title. If you have any dietary requirements, or would like to attend only certain days of the summer school, please specify in your email text.

The registration fee is 2000 SEK (approx. 225 EUR, ) and covers lunches, coffee breaks, the social event, and the study material but does not include the social dinner. The ticket to the social dinner costs 500 SEK and can be requested upon registration (please indicate in your email). The deadline for registration is April 15, 2015. After sending the registration email, you will receive a confirmation. Please proceed to payment after you receive the confirmation email.

If your registration is confirmed, please use the PayPal page (to be provided in March 2015).