Andreas Zeller will give the ICPC 2015 keynote

Preprint Available

Test Complement Exclusion: Guarantees from Dynamic Analysis

Modern test generation techniques allow to generate as many executions as needed; combined with dynamic analysis, they allow for understanding program behavior in situations where static analysis is challenged or impossible. However, all these dynamic techniques would still suffer from the incompleteness of testing: If some behavior has not been observed so far, there is no guarantee that it may not occur in the future. In this talk, I introduce a method called Test Complement Exclusion that combines test generation and sandboxing to provide such a guarantee. Test Complement Exclusion will have significant impact in the security domain, as it effectively detects and protects against unexpected changes of program behavior; however, guarantees would also strengthen findings in dynamic software comprehension. First experiments on real-world ANDROID programs demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

Andreas Zeller is a full professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, since 2001. His research concerns the analysis of large software systems and their development process. In 2010, Zeller was inducted as Fellow of the ACM for his contributions to automated debugging and mining software archives, for which he also was awarded 10-year impact awards from ACM SIGSOFT and ICSE. In 2011, he received an ERC Advanced Grant, Europe's highest and most prestigious individual research grant, for work on specification mining and test case generation. In 2013, Zeller co-founded Testfabrik AG, a start-up on automatic testing of Web applications, where he chairs the supervisory board.