International Test Conference is pleased to announce that Dr. Patrice Godefroid, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, will deliver a Keynote Address on Thursday, October 23. This address covers the topic of Automated Software Testing.  

Dr. Godefroid received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering (Computer Science elective) and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Liege, Belgium, in 1989 and 1994 respectively. From 1994 to 2006, he worked at Bell Laboratories (part of Lucent Technologies), where he was promoted to "distinguished member of technical staff" in 2001. His research interests include program (mostly software) specification, analysis, testing and verification.

During the last decade, research on automating software testing using program analysis has experienced quite a resurgence. A key technical challenge is automatic code-driven test generation: given a program with a set of input parameters, how to automatically generate a set of input values that, upon execution, will exercise as many program statements as possible. Although automating test generation using program analysis is an old idea, practical tools have only started to emerge over the last few years. This recent progress was enabled by advances in dynamic test generation, automated constraint solving, and modern computers' increasing computational power. All these tools combine techniques from static program analysis (symbolic execution), dynamic analysis (testing and runtime instrumentation), model checking (systematic state-space exploration), and automated constraint solving (SMT solvers). However, they target different application domains and include other original techniques. This talk will present an overview of recent advances on automatic test generation, and discuss applications of these techniques in the software industry.

A key benefit of bringing our conference to Seattle is the ability to tap into local technology excellence from Microsoft Research and other companies. We hope you will join us there in October.