Tales from the world of testing

This week Adam held an invited talk about automated testing of XSL Transformations at ETSE2012. The workshop covered a wide range of topics, ranging from analysis of performance requirement fulfillment in concurrent embedded systems, fully automatic tests of GUIs, to automatic derivation of formal test cases from natural language specifications. The workshop concluded with a fascinating talk by Mark Grechanik about moving from "linear" tests to adaptive tests which function like feedback control systems.

The ETSE workshop was co-located with ISSTA 2012, and Adam got the chance to attend some very interesting talks at this conference as well. Particular highlights were the keynotes by Martin Rinard (thought-provoking and controversial about program transformations which sacrifice correctness for accuracy and bug-freedom) and Rance Cleaveland (insightful about the interplay of research/fun and industry/profit), as well as Yannis Smaragdakis' talk on Residual Investigation, which presented a recipe for deriving a dynamic analysis from a given conservative static analysis.