Despite falling in and out of fashion over the last 30 years, software testing – executing a system to draw conclusions about its behavior – has remained a fundamental software development focus. As software development practices and approaches are evolving rapidly, however, the old assumptions, goals and strategies that once brought success will begin to prove less effective. Therefore, researchers should begin thinking about and addressing what these and many other changes mean to software testing.
In this talk I’ll briefly highlight some key trends and challenges that are reshaping software systems and development approaches and provide two examples of my recent research that takes a broader, more exploratory view of what software testing is good for and how it can make software development more effective: testing to understand interactions in highly configurable systems and testing to discover auto-tuning rules for elastic clouds.
Since 1991 Dr. Porter has been a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Studies (UMIACS). He is also currently serving as the Scientific and Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering, a UMD-affiliated applied research and technology transition center.
Dr. Porter is an award-winning teacher and researcher, whose work has generally focused on developing tools and techniques for large-scale software development and quality assurance. Specifically, his research has focused on developing empirical methods for identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in industrial development processes, experimental evaluation of fundamental software engineering hypotheses, and development of tools that demonstrably improve fundamental software development processes, such as software inspection and software testing. He also created and runs one of the world's largest Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) on Mobile Application Development for the Android Platform, which has had over 800,000+ student registrations from nearly every country on the planet.