Automatically Enhancing Test Suites to Improve Software Quality
How would you present STAMP?
STAMP addresses the need for increased quality of automatic testing in a continuous delivery pipeline. Companies that have adopted DevOps already have a culture of automatic testing, but also acknowledge that the quality of their test suites can be improved. STAMP develops technology that has exactly this objective: automatically enhance existing test assets, such as unit test suites or test configurations, to improve software quality in DevOps.
What is your role in STAMP?
I am the scientific and technical coordinator of the project. As such, I lead all collaborative activities, actively disseminate the results of the project and coordinate the management tasks. I also coordinate the scientific and research activities on unit test amplification within WP1.
What key innovation do you bring or help to develop?
I contribute to the development and experimentation of a novel concept in the area of test automation, which is called “test amplification”. The key idea is to start from existing test assets, i.e., any program or script that already automates a testing task, and then generate variants of these assets through automatic transformations. The intuition is that these assets embed essential knowledge put there by a human developer, but that this knowledge is naturally only partial because it is manually defined. In this context, machines can be very good at exploring large quantities of variants that rely on the same knowledge but trigger diverse behavior that need to be tested.
A word about yourself and your organization
I am scientist working in the area of software engineering. Until 2017, I was at INRIA, in Rennes, France. Now, I am at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, Sweden. I lead a group of students and engineers who investigate algorithms and tools to automatically diversify software components (unit test cases in STAMP, libraries and applications in the context of other projects).
I strongly believe in the value of EU projects to strengthen scientific collaborations within Europe, to increase the impact of science on innovation through direct experiments with use case providers and to increase the visibility of science and software tools through open source consortia.
STAMP Tests with Mutants
Date: 27/10/2017
Learn more about testing your software tests with mutants through this EclipseCon Europe 2017 video presentation by Benoit Baudry:
STAMP for DevOps Teams
Date: 24/07/2019
In this video, Benoit Baudry, KTH Professor in software technologies and STAMP project coordinator, explains how STAMP open source tools can improve automatically test suites in a DevOps environment.