Graphsy Blog

The third day was the least eventful.  There was a single session and a keynote.  Unfortunately we had to leave before the keynote so I only attended the session.  There was one great presentation and two that seemed like they were getting at something, but didn’t make much sense at the time.  Will read the papers and hopefully understand them better.

The presentation I enjoyed was entitled “Improving Structure Testing of Object-Oriented Programs via Integrating Evolutionary Testing and Symbolic Execution”.  The work combines two methods for automating the generation of unit tests.  The first is using evolutionary algorithms to create sequences of statement execution.  The second involves using logical inference to select good inputs into functions.  This work combined them together to automatically generate good unit tests.  In fact, when they applied their method on several real world examples they were able to catch more bugs than either the hand crafted unit tests or the methods working independently. The presentation was simple, straightforward, and just made a lot of sense.

Overall I thought ASE was a good conference that is worth attending in the future.  Their name is a bit of a misnomer, since most of the papers dealt with Modeling, SOA, and Testing.  I think they needed more software creation, though that may have just been this year’s crop.  There were a few crappy papers and presentations, but all conferences have that.  The best papers were exceptional and well worth finding out about.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 2:28 pm and is filed under opinion, software engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.