Keynote

Lionel C. Briand, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway.

Empirical Evaluation of Search-Based Test-Case Generation: A Systematic Review and Guidelines

Metaheuristic search techniques have been extensively used to automate the process of generating test cases and thus providing solutions for a more cost-effective testing process. Since Search-based Software Testing (SBST) techniques are heuristic by nature, they must be empirically investigated in terms of how costly and effective they are at reaching their test objectives and to assess whether they scale up to realistic development artifacts. Such empirical studies are however not trivial to design, perform, and report. This presentation reports on the results of a systematic, comprehensive review that aims at characterizing how empirical studies have been designed and reported to investigate SBST cost-effectiveness. Based on the results of this study, I will also outline and illustrate a set of guidelines to make the empirical assessment of SBST more systematic, by promoting well designed and executed empirical studies.

Presenter's Bio

Lionel C. Briand is a group leader at the Simula Research laboratory and a professor at the University of Oslo (Norway), leading projects on software verification and validation in collaboration with industry. Before that, he was on the faculty of the department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he was full professor and held the Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Software Quality Engineering. He has also been the software quality engineering department head at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Germany, and worked as a research scientist for the Software Engineering Laboratory, a consortium of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CSC, and the University of Maryland, USA. Lionel has been on the program, steering, or organization committees of many international, IEEE and ACM conferences. He is the coeditor-in-chief of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) and is a member of the editorial boards of Systems and Software Modeling (Springer) and Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability (Wiley). He was on the board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering from 2000 to 2004. Lionel is an IEEE Fellow and a registered Canadian engineer (Ontario). His research interests include: model-driven development, testing and quality assurance, and empirical software engineering.