Speaker: Alessandro Orso , College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Analysis and Testing of Deployed Software
Abstract: Software products are often released with missing functionality, errors, or incompatibilities that may result in failures, inferior performances, or, more generally, user dissatisfaction. In many cases, this situation is due to limitations in the way quality-assurance activities are performed. Usually, these activities are performed in-house, on developer platforms, and using developer-provided inputs that may not reflect the way software is used in the field.
The Gamma approach aims to leverage the characteristics of today's computing world (e.g., widespread usage of software, high connectivity, substantial computing power for the average user) to overcome these limitations. Gamma facilitates continuous analysis and testing of deployed software by (1) augmenting quality-assurance tasks traditionally performed in-house with actual data from the field, and (2) shifting part of in-house activities to actual user environments, so as to leverage in-the-field computational power and human resources.
In this talk, I will introduce the Gamma approach, present an application of Gamma to two fundamental tasks performed by software engineers during maintenance, impact analysis and regression testing, and discuss future research directions within Gamma.
Short Bio: Alessandro Orso received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 1995 and 1999. He was a visiting researcher in the EECS Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1999. Since March 2000, he has been a research faculty member in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Orso's area of research is software engineering, with emphasis on software testing and analysis. His interests include development of techniques for improving software reliability and trustworthiness, and the validation of such techniques on real systems. Dr. Orso is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.
Host: Purush Iyer, Computer Science, NCSU