Distinguished
Lecture Series: Test Generation and Fault Localization
for Web Applications
Dr. Frank Tip
IBM T.J.
Watson Research Center
Friday 15th
October, 10:00, InfoLab21 C60b/c
Abstract
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The
Apollo project at IBM Research aims to develop practical automated techniques
for finding and localizing bugs in web applications. We adapted an existing
dynamic test generation technique that combines concrete and symbolic execution
to the domain of web applications written in PHP, and used it to find dozens of
failures in open-source PHP applications. To help programmers with localizing
the faults that cause these failures, we adapted existing fault localization
techniques that predict in which statements a fault is located by applying a
statistical analysis to execution data gathered from multiple tests. Our
results indicate that, using our best technique, 87.7% of faults are localized
to within 1% of all executed statements. We also address the question of how to
localize a fault when the programmer is confronted with a failure but no test
suite is available that can be used for fault localization. In such cases, our
new directed test generation technique is capable of generating small test
suites with high fault-localization effectiveness.
This research is joint work with Shay Artzi, Danny Dig, Julian Dolby, Michael
Ernst, Adam Kiezun, and Marco Pistoia. More details about this work can be
found in our ISSTA'08, ICSE'10, and ISSTA'10 papers.
Dr. Frank Tip
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Frank
Tip received his PhD in 1995 from the University of Amsterdam. Since then, he
has been with IBM Research, where he is currently managing the Program Analysis
and Transformation Group. Frank's current research interests include
Refactoring, Test Generation and Fault Localization for Web Applications,
Data-Centric Synchronization and Declarative Object Identity for
Object-Oriented Programming Languages, and Change Impact Analysis. Frank is
currently on sabbatical with the Programming Tools Group at the University of
Oxford.