Test diversity as a general driver in test automation

Test diversity as a general driver in test automation
Speaker: Prof Robert Feldt (Chalmers and Blekinge University)

For robustness and reliability, it has long been an informal mantra that "one should not lay all one's egg in one basket". Essentially, if we are performing multiple tests of a piece of software we are better off selecting more diverse inputs than if we select inputs that are more similar. However, a struggle has been to quantify this notion in a general and meaningful way so that it can be used for automated testing and analysis. By using theoretical and universal (!) measures from Information Theory this has changed and we now have generally applicable diversity measures both between pairs of inputs as well as for sets. While empirical results using these measures have shown impressive and state-of-the-art results for test selection and there have been efforts to speed them up we argue that they have not yet been much explored in a wider, but natural, set of test automation scenarios. In this talk I will present a few such scenarios and show some recent results on the powerful and general test methods that a diversity perspective can lead to.

Bio:
Robert Feldt is professor of software engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. He has broad research interests spanning from human factors to hard core automation and statistics, and including software testing and quality, requirements engineering, human-centered (behavioral) software engineering. He was an early contributor to search-based software engineering and have recently argued for increased application of psychology and social science to better understand and improve software engineering. Most of his research is empirical and conducted in close collaboration with industry partners in Sweden, Europe and Asia but he also leads more basic research. He received a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Chalmers University of Technology in 2002, studied psychology at Gothenburg University in the 90's and has also worked as an IT and software consultant for more than 25 years. He is passionate about empirical research and methods and to change organisations through technical innovation.
http://www.robertfeldt.net/
https://scholar.google.se/citations?hl=en&user=VemqkeEAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate