Speaker: Dr. Dianxiang Xu North Dakota State University When: Friday, Nov 9th, 2007 Time: 2:00pm Where: ECS 243 (HPDRC Conf. Room)

Abstract:

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a new programming paradigm that modularizes crosscutting concerns into aspects. However, aspects can be used in a harmful way that invalidates desired properties and even destroys the conceptual integrity of programs. The new AOP constructs also yield new types of programming faults such as incorrect pointcuts, advice or aspect precedence. Therefore, new strategies, techniques, and practices are much needed for quality assurance of aspect-oriented programs. This talk presents a state-based approach to automated generation of aspect tests for verifying whether or not an aspect-oriented program meets its requirements. The approach allows for testable specification of aspect-oriented systems with finite state machines. Executable test code can be generated automatically from aspect-oriented state models for a variety of structural coverage criterion, including state coverage, transition coverage, transition pair coverage, and round-trip. Aspect-specific faults can be determined through an incremental testing process, where classes are first tested before aspects. In this incremental testing process, hand-crafted test data for classes can be reused for aspects if they are still valid. Mutation analysis for evaluating cost-effectiveness of different test generation strategies is also briefly discussed.

Biography:
Dr. Dianxiang Xu received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees all in Computer Science from Nanjing University, China. He is assistant professor of computer science at North Dakota State University. From May 1999 to August 2000, he was a research associate at Florida International University, working with Dr. Deng and Dr. He. From August 2000 to July 2003, he was research assistant professor and engineer in the Computer Science Department at Texas A&M University. His research interests are in the areas of software testing, aspect-oriented software development, software security, applied formal methods, and software agents. He is a senior member of the IEEE.