Microsoft Research Projects of Interest – Testing

Microsoft has a number of great groups at the MSR and a lot of interesting projects. I am nearly done with my PhD and am looking for possible opportunities at various research labs and groups. In this series of posts, I am going to briefly summarize interesting projects select for MSR researcher and post-doc positions.

Testing

Pex provides white box testing support for .Net apps. Pex can find input-output values of a method that can identify whether assertions about the base values are correct. Each contract acts as an oracle, giving a test run a pass/fail indication. Pex uses contracts to generate more meaningful unit tests by filtering out meaningless test arguments that don’t satisfy the pre-conditions. A nice Pex tutorial is here.

Moles is a lightweight framework for test stubs and detours in .NET that is based on delegates. Moles may be used to detour any .NET method, including non-virtual/static methods in sealed types. Moles is freely available on Visual Studio Gallery or bundled with Pex.

Automated Test Generation (ATG) attempts to provide support for automated testing using static and dynamic program analysis. It uses a combination of program analysis, testing, model checking and theorem proving described in this paper.