Collaborative Research: II-EN: Infrastructure Support for Software Testing Research

Software testing techniques are fundamental to the development of dependable software. Computer scientists studying testing techniques must be able to evaluate and compare them empirically, and this requires access to a wide range of infrastructure support including programs, program versions, test suites, and fault data.

This project provides that support, focusing on test generation and on software domains that are increasingly important: concurrent and distributed systems, software product lines, and web services. The PIs are collecting and constructing systems, specifications, version attributes, test attributes and fault attributes relevant to these domains, and organizing them in formats that allow computer scientists to utilize them efficiently in controlled experiments.

Th PIs are embedding these artifacts in the existing Software-artifact Infrastructure Repository (SIR), a repository established under prior NSF support to facilitate experimentation with deterministic C and Java systems. They are also enhancing SIR's support for community contributions, by providing moderated write access to the repository; this will be expanded in the latter years of the project, following the spirit of open-source models for system management. The infrastructure being assembled enables several

specific research and educational projects related to software testing, by the project researchers themselves and by the software engineering research community as a whole.