GTAC 2010: Automatically Generating Test Data for Web Applications

Google Test Automation Conference 2010 October 28-29, 2010 Automatically Generating Test Data for Web Applications Presented by Jeff Offutt, Professor of Software Engineering, Volgenau School of Information and Technology, George Mason University. Abstract: The past decade has seen exciting changes in how we develop and test software. The need for reliability has grown enormously: The user base is expanding, technological advances put software into more mission-critical locations, software continues to grow in complexity, and software must be correct to be secure. However, despite the fact that many test techniques and criteria invented by researchers are now mature enough to be ready for industrial use, few have been adopted by industry. In particular, one of the hardest problems in software testing is automatic generation of test inputs; a problem with many sophisticated solutions from the research community but for which most industrial tools only use primitive solutions. This talk will discuss automatic test data generation in the context of unit / developer testing (dynamic domain reduction) and system testing of web applications (bypass testing), and explore some of the difficulties in transitioning research results in software testing to industrial use. Speaker Bio: Dr. Jeff Offutt is Professor of Software Engineering at George Mason University. He has invented numerous test strategies, published over 120 refereed research papers, and is co-author of the textbook Introduction to Software Testing. He is editor-in-chief of Wiley's journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability; steering committee chair for the IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation; and program chair for ICST 2009. He has consulted with numerous companies on software testing, usability, and software intellectual property issues. Offutt is on the web at http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~offutt/. Talk Slides: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B4fT-BFGDnQkNWU5ZjI5NDMtMzBlNS00YTMxLWFmMTctMTI4NjA4YzhlOTFm