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UW CSE’s René Just earns ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ASE 2015

Rene JustUW CSE is a recognized powerhouse in software engineering research. Our strength was once again on display at ASE 2015, the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, where postdoc René Just captured the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for the paper, “Do Automatically Generated Unit Tests Find Real Faults? An Empirical Study of Effectiveness and Challenges.”

Just and colleagues at the University of Sheffield and University of Luxembourg analyzed the effectiveness of three automated unit test generation tools, which are used by software developers in place of more burdensome manual testing to identify faults in their code. The researchers evaluated each tool on 357 real-world faults. They found that while the automatically generated test suites detected more than half of the faults overall, only 19.9 percent of the individual test suites detected a fault, and 15.2 percent were flaky. The team’s insights will support the development of more reliable automated unit test generators that achieve a higher fault detection rate.

Overall, UW authors had five papers accepted to ASE, and another six papers at the conference were authored by previous advisees or postdocs of UW CSE professor Michael Ernst – a strong but not unexpected showing from members past and present of our world-class PLSE group!

Read the award-winning paper here. Congratulations to René and to the entire PLSE team!