CS Faculty Candidate Colloquium
Monday ***Special Location and Time*** February 2 10:45 - 11:50 AM Kelley 1005 Alex Groce Ph.D. in CS from Carnegie Mellon University Core Member of the Lab for Reliable Software NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Traces in Spaces: You Can Learn a Lot About a Program by Running It In this talk, I present a series of connected research efforts to address one of the two fundamental problems of software testing: selecting a limited set of traces out of the essentially unbounded set of all traces a program can produce in its state space, in order to increase the possibility of exposing errors. I address this problem via random testing with feedback and backtracking program execution (model checking) with unsound abstractions and path-based heuristics. We will look at empirical results comparing these two methods and indicating key factors in successful testing, and briefly consider the other fundamental problem of testing, specifying correct behavior. Case studies and examples in this talk are drawn from flight software developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, primarily file systems to be used in the next Mars rover mission, the Mars Science Laboratory. More generally, this talk assumes that software engineering is fundamentally concerned with computer programs, and computer programs exist in order to be executed -- to produce traces. Testing and model checking can be understood as methods for selecting traces that help us understand a program, typically by demonstrating undesirable behavior. Specification and requirements engineering can be understood as the task of defining which traces are undesirable, and program design and implementation can be seen as the art and science of building a program that will produce the right traces. Biography Alex Groce received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. He is a core member of the Laboratory for Reliable Software at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and teaches classes on software testing and runtime monitoring at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests focus on software engineering, particularly the study of program traces in the contexts of testing, model checking, specification, fault localization, automated debugging, learning program behavior, and program understanding and visualization. He is the author or co-author of 6 journal publications, 22 refereed conference or workshop papers (including an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper at the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering), and 4 invited papers. Since July of 2008 he has incorporated his research interests into a role as lead developer and designer for automated testing infrastructure for the Mars Science Laboratory mission's Flight Software Internal Test team. He has received the JPL SPOT award and NASA's Turning Goals Into Reality Award for innovative research in model checking and testing and its application to critical space mission systems.
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