In Pursuit of Software Faults: Status and Challenges

Software is everywhere and our lives depend on its operation. The techniques to achieve and guarantee high software reliability have been actively pursued goals of software engineering research for decades. Two rather distinct approaches emerged. In one, state space exploration tools search for the existence of states and their combinations that, if reached during program execution, would violate some of the required properties. The other approach exploits statistical testing for demonstration of the absence of faults. Both approaches make verification and validation practice very costly

In this talk, we will analyze the techniques that improve the effectiveness of software verification. Empirical analysis of formal modeling approaches indicates that combinations of diverse tools can expose faults not detected by any of these tools in isolation. Using the example from biometric recognition, we demonstrate that domain specific model-based analysis can lead to meaningful ultra high reliability assessment. Recent research in software analytics demonstrates effective guidelines for verification activities throughout the development and maintenance process. We will outline the most promising research directions for streamlining software verification and validation activities and some of the remaining research challenges.

Biography

Bojan Cukic is a Robert C. Byrd Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at West Virginia University (WVU). He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Houston. His research interests include software engineering, information assurance and biometrics, and resilient computing.

Dr. Cukic received a US National Science Foundation Career award and a Tycho Brahe award for outstanding empirical research from the NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. He is the director of Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), an NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center. He represents WVU at the University Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP) forum of the National Academies and is a member of the executive committee of the National Center for Border Security and Immigration (BORDERS), a DHS academic center of excellence lead by the University of Arizona. Dr. Cukic served as a program chair of IEEE Symposium of Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2005), High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE ’07), Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE ’03 and ’11), Intelligence and Security Informatics (‘12), a guest editor of IEEE Software magazine and a member of the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering journal (’08-’14).