Murphy, Christian

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2011 - 20132
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  • Publication
    Automatic Test Case Generation and Test Suite Reduction for Closed-Loop Controller Software
    (2013-01-01) Murphy, Christian; Zoomkawalla, Zoher; Narita, Koichiro
    Domains such as embedded systems, medical devices, process automation, etc. make use of controller software to make important decisions that can affect people’s lives and well being. Although safety-focused processes such as model-driven development can be used to assure a certain degree of quality in these applications, ultimately software testing still remains the primary mechanism by which faults are detected. However, a variety of challenges arises in identifying test cases for controller software, particularly in closed-loop systems that incorporate feedback from the entity being controlled, potentially leading to exponential growth in the number of paths through the code and difficulty in identifying sequences of inputs to put the application into the desired states for testing. In this paper, we present an approach to efficiently generating a set of test cases that will cover all reachable states in closedloop controller software, describe how it is possible to reduce the number of test cases without losing any coverage of states, and present evidence that, compared to other approaches, the technique significantly reduces the number of test cases (down to less than 1% in our experiments) needed to achieve the same level of coverage, with almost no negative effects on the test suite’s fault-finding capabilities.
  • Publication
    On Effective Testing of Health Care Simulation Software
    (2011-05-01) Murphy, Christian; Raunak, M. S.; King, Andrew; Chen, Sanjian; Imbriano, Christopher; Kaiser, Gail; Lee, Insup; Sokolsky, Oleg; Clarke, Lori; Osterweil, Leon
    Health care professionals rely on software to simulate anatomical and physiological elements of the human body for purposes of training, prototyping, and decision making. Software can also be used to simulate medical processes and protocols to measure cost effectiveness and resource utilization. Whereas much of the software engineering research into simulation software focuses on validation (determining that the simulation accurately models real-world activity), to date there has been little investigation into the testing of simulation software itself, that is, the ability to effectively search for errors in the implementation. This is particularly challenging because often there is no test oracle to indicate whether the results of the simulation are correct. In this paper, we present an approach to systematically testing simulation software in the absence of test oracles, and evaluate the effectiveness of the technique.