Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contracts with Industry

This work is performed in collaboration with April Technologies. This company develops all the IT solutions for April group (http://groupe.april.fr/groupe ) and their clients in the insurance business. They have a very large information system that they specialize for all the divisions of the group. A critical need for them is to ensure that changes in their applications (new features, bug repair, etc.) do not degrade functional correctness and performance.

Software testing techniques and tools have greatly improved over the last decade and it is now possible for software developers to write test cases that are automatically executed. Consequently, each time the program evolves, it is rebuild and re-tested automatically, which supports the detection of errors early in the process and prevents the propagation of the bug into the production code. However, the test cases are manually written and are thus usually weak when it comes at finding bugs that are deep in the code or in nested loops for example. The main challenge of this work is automatically generate new test cases that increase the effectiveness of regression testing.

In this project we aim at automatically generating new test cases from the ones that have been manually produced by the developers, in order to add value in the continuous integration process and improve the quality of software that goes in production. The process of automatically producing new test cases from existing ones is called test amplification. We can experiment our recent results about test transformations on April Technologies's set of test cases very early in the project.

This project supports one postdoc in the DiverSE team and is funded by Inria's transfer and industrial partnership department.