Dr. Laura K. Dillon Michigan State University Monday, April 12 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm / Chem 200 Getting Results from Testing ============================ Can you afford to release software that could bring down power, leave phone calls hanging, or route two airplanes into the same airspace? Can you prevent software bugs that "should be" caught in testing from eluding your testing team and coming back to bite you? Testing is not capable of proving that a system behaves correctly under all circumstances. However, it remains the most cost-effective means of demonstrating system dependability, and as such it is a crucial software development activity. Yet the typical testing process is such a human intensive activity that it is by nature error-prone and unproductive. The automation and formalization of testing techniques can enhance productivity of software developers and reduce errors in the development process. Formalization entails the use of mathematical models in specifying and reasoning about software requirements and also in defining requirements of the testing process. This talk will describe an application to testing of a specific formal method related to temporal logic. (A temporal logic is a formal logic that has been extended with a notion of ordering in time.) I will describe Graphical Interval Logic (GIL), a logic in which to specify temporal properties of real-time systems, as well as a method for constructing "oracles" from GIL specifications. GIL oracles check for temporal faults in test executions, ensuring that the testing team does not overlook executions that exhibit subtle timing and ordering faults. The visually intuitive representation of GIL specifications makes them easier to develop and to understand than specifications written in more traditional temporal logics. Biographical Information ======================== Laura K. Dillon earned the M.S. degree in Mathematics from the University of Michigan and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Previously, she was one year on the faculties of Computer and Information Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and twelve years on the faculty of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University in 1997, where she is now a Professor and Chair. Her research interests center on formal methods for specification and analysis of concurrent software systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Professor Dillon has served the research and professional communities in various editorial capacities and on numerous program committees, most recently as program co-chair of the 2003 International Conference on Software Engineering. Currently, she is a member of the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and she also serves on the Executive Committee of the ACM Special Interest Group in Software Engineering.