Paolo Tonella

Search Based Test-case Generation

Abstract
Search based algorithms are used to address the problem of automatically generating the test data necessary to ensure a given test adequacy level is met (e.g., branch coverage). Search algorithms resort to a fitness function in order to select the most promising solutions during search space exploration. This makes them quite robust with respect to program properties (e.g., infeasible paths) that are hard to deal with using static analysis. In this talk, I will introduce the basic principles behind the search based algorithms most widely used in software testing. I will describe how they are instantiated to solve the test data generation problem and I will present the extensions required when the program under test is an object oriented program. I will conclude with an overview of recent attempts to combine search based test case generation and dynamic symbolic execution.

Speaker's Bio
Paolo Tonella is head of the Software Engineering Research Unit at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), in Trento, Italy. He received his PhD degree in Software Engineering from the University of Padova, in 1999, with the thesis "Code Analysis in Support to Software Maintenance". In 2011 he was awarded the ICSE 2001 MIP (Most Influential Paper) award, for his paper: "Analysis and Testing of Web Applications". He is the author of "Reverse Engineering of Object Oriented Code", Springer, 2005. He participated in several industrial and EU projects on software analysis and testing. He wrote over 150 peer reviewed conference/workshop papers and over 50 journal papers. His H-index (according to Google scholar) is 43.
Paolo Tonella was Program Chair of ICSM 2011 and ICPC 2007. He was General Chair of ISSTA 2010, ICSM 2012 and he is General Chair of SSBSE 2015. Among the others, he served in the program committees of ICSE, FSE, ICSM, ISSTA, ICST, ICPC. In 2007, Paolo Tonella was ranked among the top-50 Software Engineering scholars in an article published by the Communications of the ACM (vol. 50, n. 6, pp. 81-85, June 2007). He is associate editor of TSE and he is in the editorial board of EMSE and JSPE. His current research interests include code analysis, web and object oriented testing, search based test case generation.