Events Calendar

CS Distinguished Lecture: Gail Kaiser (Columbia): Testing 1... 2... 3...

Speaker: Gail Kaiser, Columbia

Talk Title: Testing 1... 2... 3...

Series: CS Distinguished Lectures

Abstract: Testing software systems is hard. Conventional software testing checks whether each output is correct for the set of test inputs. But for some software, it is not known what the correct output should be for some inputs. How can we construct and execute test cases that will find coding errors even when we do not know whether the output is correct? And for most software, the development-lab testing process can not cover all inputs and/or internal states that can arise after deployment. How can we construct and execute test cases that operate in the states that occur during user operation to continue to find coding errors without impacting the user? Finally, for some (most?) software, even with rigorous pre and post deployment testing, users will inevitably notice errors that were not detected by the developer's test cases. How can we construct and execute new test cases that reproduce these errors? This talk will present an overview of my lab's past decade and ongoing research on these hard testing problems.


Biography: Gail E. Kaiser is a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Programming Systems Laboratory in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. She was named an NSF Presidential Young Investigator in Software Engineering and Software Systems in 1988, and has published over 150 refereed papers in a range of software areas. Prof. Kaiser's research interests include social software engineering, collaborative work, privacy and security, software reliability, self-managing systems, parallel and distributed systems, Web technologies, information management, and software development environments and tools. She has consulted or worked summers for courseware authoring, software process and networking startups, several defense contractors, the Software Engineering Institute, Bell Labs, IBM, Siemens, Sun and Telcordia. Her lab has been funded by NSF, NIH, DARPA, ONR, NASA, NYS Science & Technology Foundation, and numerous companies. Prof. Kaiser served on the editorial board of IEEE Internet Computing for many years, was a founding associate editor of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, chaired an ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, vice chaired three of the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, and serves frequently on conference program committees. She also served on the Committee of Examiners for the Educational Testing Service's Computer Science Advanced Test (the GRE CS test) for three years, and has chaired her department's doctoral program since 1997. Prof. Kaiser received her PhD and MS from CMU and her ScB from MIT.

Host: William GJ Halfond

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair