[FM-India] Research Assistant opening at National University of Singapore

Abhik Roychoudhury abhik at comp.nus.edu.sg
Wed Mar 20 12:44:30 IST 2013



I have a research assistant opening in one of my projects on testing and 
analysis. The
initial appointment is for 1 year, but can be renewed for several more 
years - since there is funding.
This is only an employment in research - there is no requirement on the 
student to do PhD.
Salary and other benefits can be discussed with individual interested 
candidates.

If you are interested contact  abhik at comp.nus.edu.sg with your CV.

More details about the research project appear below.



Ministry of Education grant:

Analysis and Test generation of Evolving Software



Project website
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~abhik/projects/moe10/project.html



Principal Investigator:  Abhik Roychoudhury, web site
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~abhik/





Project abstract:

Programmers do not write programs entirely from scratch. Over time, a
program gradually evolves from one program version to another. However, as
software evolves from one version to another - testing/debugging to ensure
that the program continues to meet its intended functionality is
difficult.
Validation of such evolving programs (say, to address possible bugs
introduced via program changes) remains a huge problem in software
development. This adds to the cost for software maintenance, which is much
larger than the initial software development cost. The cost of maintaining
a
software and managing its evolution is said to account for more than 90%
of
the total cost of a software project, prompting authors to call it the
"legacy crisis". In this project, we seek to develop testing and
validation
methods for evolving software to bring down such costs.

The main innovation of the proposed work lies in making testing/debugging
methods change-aware. A commonly used terminology in software engineering
is
"regression testing" where a changed program version is tested to check
for
possible regressions (some functionality which worked earlier but is
broken
due to the changes). In practice, regression testing often amounts to
re-testing, or testing a selected sub-set of tests. Ideally, as changes
are
made in the program, the test-suite should also evolve with the program -
an
aspect that we study in this project. Akin to regression testing, we also
study regression debugging, where we root-cause the reason for any
detected
software regression. The innovative aspect of our proposed work in
regression debugging lies in using symbolic execution based semantic
analysis of the failed test case as opposed to enumerating the changes
across program versions.





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-- 

- Abhik Roychoudhury
National University of Singapore
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~abhik



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