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| CACTES |
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CACTES: a formal framework for CompositionAl Conformance
TEsting of Service compositions
*
Prof. T.H. Tse
(The University of Hong Kong),
* Supported in part by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council
of Hong Kong (Project No. 717308).
In service computing, a service usually collaborates with other services.
It may also comprise other services and self-offering actions.
The testing of a service is complex
and needs to address both the concurrent and
sequential dimensions of service composition.
As service compositions may be complicated,
it is attractive to apply compositional testing,
which means the assurance of the overall
quality of an entire service composition based
on the testing of individual (or groups of) services.
Previous work focuses on addressing the concurrent dimension, since the
sequentiality aspect is thought of as relatively easy.
However, we have identified quite a
number of non-trivial problems in the latter
aspect that cannot be handled satisfactorily by existing techniques.
We propose, therefore, to address the sequential dimension in this project.
We conduct a formal analysis of
conformance testing in the context of sequential service composition.
We propose to use
process algebra as the platform to
handle the issue and model a service as a process.
We have identified a number of counterexamples to show that there are subtle
problems to hinder compositional testing in sequential composition of services.
We propose the notion of sequential extension as
the basis for tackling such difficulties.
A service which sequentially extends another
service will enable the latter to be decomposed
sequentially into component services.
These component services can be abstracted
individually and compositionally and, at the
same time, the former service should conform
to the resultant service composition thus constructed.
We target to produce a series of mathematical theorems to show that the
notions support compositional conformance testing.
To show the practicality of our formal
framework, we shall then implement it in a
testing tool and conduct experimentation to
verify the viability of our proposal.
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| FLOW |
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FLOW:
automatic Fault LOcalization for Wireless sensor network software applications:
a statistical fault divergence approach
*
Prof. T.H. Tse
(The University of Hong Kong),
* Supported in part by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council
of Hong Kong (Project No. 716507).
Program debugging aims at localizing faults and removing them.
Through instrumented executions, dynamic fault localization techniques
provide a candidate set of faulty positions in a program.
Pervasive computing is of emerging importance in today's applications.
The debugging of such complex systems is crucial for assuring their
quality, but the task is difficult because of context-sensitive issues
in a volatile and unpredictable environment.
In this project, we propose to study fault-localization techniques
for conventional programs and further develop them for pervasive computing.
We shall investigate the dynamic properties of program executions and
design statistical fault localization techniques for both conventional
and context-aware applications.
Behavioral statistics are derived from successful and failed runs.
We shall contrast not only the former against the latter, but also
the changing trends in both situations.
Through detailed analyses and modeling of the statistical footprints
of how faults diverge and propagate, the project aims at integrating
our model with a data-centric approach to effectively and robustly
rank the fault-relevance of program predicates, with a view to
reducing the number of candidate faulty positions.
In particular, footprints specific to pervasive applications will be explored.
The integration of testing and debugging tools for wireless sensor
network applications will also be studied.
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| TIRAMISU |
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TIRAMISU: testing conText-sensItive, concurRent
And MIddleware-baSed Ubiquitous software
*
Prof. T.H. Tse
(The University of Hong Kong)
and
* Supported in part by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council
of Hong Kong (Project No. 717506).
Ubiquitous computing means computing anywhere and at
any time. Context-sensitive ubiquitous software dynamically
adapts its operations according to the changing environment.
One of the strategic directions of Hong Kong is to become a
world-class base for supply chain management.
Ubiquitous
middleware-based sensor network systems are envisaged to
be an essential enabling technology.
Nevertheless, many
researchers have emphasized the difficulties in assuring the
quality of such software, because context-sensitive
applications operate in a highly volatile and unpredictable
environment.
We were the first research group to embark on
their testing techniques.
We propose a major project to
comprehensively address both the integration and unit
testing of these systems.
In integration testing, we propose a model in
Communicating Sequential Processes to generate test cases
that conform to the components in a ubiquitous environment.
We make use of a notion of anti-extension, which can help to
alleviate the state-explosion problem in test case generation.
Context detections and function activations are the duties
of the middleware.
In unit testing, test oracles may not be
immediately available for a component under test.
We
propose the application of metamorphic testing to solve the
problem, focusing on isotropic context properties.
They can
reveal failures not identifiable by conventional testing
methods.
This project has important theoretical and practical
implications.
It will solve the major difficulties in testing
complex context-sensitive middleware-based ubiquitous
software.
It will also illustrate the usefulness of formal
approaches to software testing in practical situations.
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