15 - 19 June, 2009, Novosibirsk, Akademgorodok, Russia

Tutorial
Held on: 10.00-13.00, Monday, June 15

Parameterized Unit Testing: Principles, Techniques, and Applications in Practice
Wolfram Schulte
Microsoft Research, USA

Developer testing has been widely recognized as an important and valuable means of improving software reliability, partly due to its capabilities of exposing bugs early in the development life cycle. Recently parameterized unit testing has emerged as a very promising and effective methodology to allow the separation of two developer testing concerns or tasks: the specification of external, black-box behaviour (i.e., assertions or specifications) by developers and the generation and selection of internal, white-box test inputs (i.e., high-code-covering test inputs) by tools. A parameterized unit test (PUT) is simply a test method that takes parameters, calls the code under test, and states assertions. PUTs have been supported by JUnit 4 and .NET test frameworks such as NUnit, xUnit, and MbUnit. Various industrial testing tools such as Pex for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Agitar AgitarOne for Java also exist to generate test inputs for PUTs.

This tutorial presents the latest research and practice on principles, techniques, and applications of parameterized unit testing in practice, highlighting success stories, research and education achievements, and future research directions in developer testing. The tutorial will help improve developer skills and knowledge for writing PUTs and give overview of tool automation in supporting PUTs. Attendees will acquire the skills and knowledge needed to perform research or conduct practice in the field of developer testing and to integrate developer testing techniques in their own research, practice, and education.

Wolfram Schulte

Wolfram Schulte is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (Redmond) and the founding manager of that lab's Research in Software Engineering area. His main research interest is programmer productivity, including software engineering, programming languages, program analysis, testing and related issues. At Microsoft, Prof. Schulte has co-lead research projects on software analysis and verification (the Spec# and VCC projects), on software testing (the Pex, SpecExplorer, and nModel projects), on programming language and runtime system design (the AsmL, Cω , and TPL projects), and, lately, on model-driven engineering of applications for embedded systems (the Formula project). Before joining Microsoft Research, Prof. Schulte worked at the University of Ulm  (1993-1999), at sd&m, a German software company (1992-1993), and at the Technical University Berlin  (1987-1992).

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