THE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING GROUP  TACCLE Project

TACCLE: object-oriented software Testing At the Class and Cluster LEvels * Prof. T.H. Tse (The University of Hong Kong), Prof. Huo Yan Chen (Jinan University), Prof. T.Y. Chen (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia), Dr F.T. Chan (The University of Hong Kong), and Dr S.C. Cheung (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) * Supported in part by a grant of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Software testing requires us to check whether the actual result produced by the software agrees with the expected outcome. In object-oriented programs, since both the actual result and the expected outcome are objects, software testers must check whether all their behaviours are equivalent. This is a formidable task if performed directly. In this project, we proposed a formal framework for object equivalence, classified the notion into various categories, derived important relationships regarding their correctness, and developed a practical methodology for object-oriented testing at the class and cluster levels. Among our research outcomes, a 54-page paper was published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, which is a top journal in software engineering. Another paper was been described by the chief editor as "one of the best [the journal has] published recently". The research results were applied to an industrial project for ASM, the world's largest supplier of assembly and packaging equipment for the semiconductor industry. The application project, known as "VITAMIN", was awarded a multi-million dollar industrial grant supported jointly by ASM and the Innovation and Technology Commission in Hong Kong. Our project was selected for a " State Science and Technlogy Award" (nominated by the Ministry of Education, China) in 2004 and a "Guangdong Province Science and Technlogy Award" in 2003.

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