Professors Sylvain Hallé and Raphaël Khoury, both members of LIF, have just learned that two of their research papers have been accepted for presentation at the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), to be held in Santa Barbara, CA, next July. Both papers have been submitted to the Demo Tools Track, which showcases concrete implementations of systems related to the testing of software.
The first paper, “SealTest: A Simple Library for Test Sequence Generation”, describes a library for generating test sequences based on a specification. Simply put, a user can describe how a given system is supposed to work (using a special kind of flowchart called a sequence diagram), and SealTest will come up with different sequences of operations that are expected to test the system in various situations. A few researchers have tackled this problem in the past; SealTest makes it possible to integrate all their algorithms into a single framework, allowing them to be compared experimentally. The SealTest library is freely available online under an open source license.
The second paper, “LabPal: Repeatable Computer Experiments Made Easy”, addresses the issue of reproducibility of experimental results: a pervasive problem in computer science where researchers report on experimental data, without providing the means (source code, files, etc.) for others to easily reproduce their results. LabPal is a Java library, designed at LIF, to easily create and run experiments on a computer. Among its features, it provides a user-friendly web console and the possibility of saving all experiment input and output data in an open format. These functionalities greatly reduce the amount of scripting needed to run experiments on a computer, and simplify their re-execution by independent parties. Like SealTest, LabPal is also freely available online under an open source license.
ISSTA is the leading research symposium on software testing and analysis, bringing together academics, industrial researchers, and practitioners to exchange new ideas, problems, and experience on how to analyze and test software systems.
That is some great news. LabPal is a great idea and it’s nice to see projects like these hosted on GitHub. Good luck with your presentations.