Program debugging with effective software fault localization

Title: Program debugging with effective software fault localization

Speaker: W. Eric Wong (University of Texas at Dallas) http://www.utdallas.edu/~ewong

Time: 15:00, July 24, 2013

Venue: Lecture Room, 3rd Floor, Building #5, State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Program debugging is an important activity in the development of reliable and trustworthy software. This activity can be very expensive and time consuming due to the difficulty of identifying the exact locations of program faults. In this talk, I will explain how to take advantage of sophisticated analysis of the static and dynamic behavior of the software under examination to prioritize suspicious code in terms of its likelihood of containing program bugs. Code with a higher risk can then be examined before that with a lower risk, as the former is more suspicious (more likely to contain program bugs) than the latter. Different techniques for fault localization based on execution
slicing, code coverage/program spectra, heuristics, neural networks, statistical analysis, and clustering will be discussed. Empirical data from case studies on programs with single and multiple bugs is used to show our techniques outperform others that have the same goal.

Biography:
W. Eric Wong received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue. He is a Professor and the Director of International Outreach in Computer Science at UTD. He also has an appointment as a Guest Researcher from NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), an agency of the U.S.Department of Commerce. Prior to joining UTD, he was with Telcordia (Bellcore) as a Senior Research Scientist and the project manager in charge of the initiative for Dependable Telecom Software Development.

Dr. Wong’s research focus is on the technology to help practitioners improve the quality of software while reducing the cost of development at the same time. In particular, he is working on software testing, debugging, risk analysis/metrics, safety/security, and reliability. Dr. Wong has very strong experience developing real-life industry applications of his research results. Since 2002, as PI or Co-PI, he has received research funding from such organizations as NSF, NASA,Avaya, IBM, Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, HP,and Hyundai Motor Company among others. He has published more than 150 papers.

Dr. Wong is a recipient of the Quality Assurance Special Achievement Award from Johnson Space Center, NASA (1997) and two Best Paper Awards from COMPSAC (2007) and ACM SAC (2011). He also serves as the Vice President of the IEEE Reliability Society and the Secretary of ACM SIGAPP, and he is the Founding Steering Committee Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Software Security and Reliability (SERE).