René Just and Michael Ernst of UW CSE, along with their colleague Gordon Fraser of the University of Sheffield, have been awarded an ACM Distinguished Paper award for their paper “Efficient mutation analysis by propagating and partitioning infected execution states,” presented on July 25 at ISSTA, the premier conference in software testing and analysis. The paper speeds up mutation analysis by 40% over the previous state of the art. Mutation analysis is widely used in testing research, because it is the most precise known approach to measure the quality of a test suite. (This is Ernst’s 6th ACM Distinguished Paper award, not to mention other best paper awards he has received. The photo shows Ernst and Just flanking the conference chairs Corina Pasareanu and Darko Marinov.)
UW CSE was well represented elsewhere in the conference, with 2 other technical papers and 3 tool demos. One other paper is “Empirically revisiting the test independence assumption” by Sai Zhang, Darioush Jalali, Jochen Wuttke, Kıvanç Muşlu, Wing Lam, Michael D. Ernst, and David Notkin, which shows how and when tests cases depend on one another, so that a test fails depending on what other test cases are run before it. The other paper is “A type system for format strings” by Konstantin Weitz, Gene Kim, Siwakorn Srisakaokul, and Michael D. Ernst, which shows how to verify correct use of format routines such as printf.