Tag Archives: devops

PhD Student Vacancy in Test Amplification

Posted in Research by

Within the Software Engineering Research Group of Delft University of Technology, we are looking for an enthusiastic and strong PhD student in the area of “test amplification”.

The PhD project will be in the context of the new STAMP project funded by the H2020 programme of the European Union.

STAMP is a 3-year R&D project, which leverages advanced research in automatic test generation to push automation in DevOps one step further through innovative methods of test amplification. It will reuse existing assets (test cases, API descriptions, dependency models), in order to generate more test cases and test configurations each time the application is updated. This project has an ambitious agenda towards industry transfer. In this regard, the STAMP project gathers 3 research groups which have strong expertise in software testing and continuous development as well as 6 industry partners that develop innovative open source software products.

The STAMP project is led by Benoit Baudry from INRIA, France. The STAMP consortium consists of the following partners

The PhD student employed by Delft University of Technology will conduct research as part of the STAMP project together with the STAMP partners. Employment will be for a period of four years. The PhD student will enroll in the TU Delft Graduate School.

The primary line of research for the TU Delft PhD student will revolve around runtime test amplification. Online test amplification automatically extracts information from logs collected in production in order to generate new tests that can replicate failures, crashes, anomalies and outlier events. The research will be devoted to (i) defining monitoring techniques and log data analytics to collect run-time information; (ii) detecting interesting behaviors with respect to existing tests; (iii) creating new tests for testing the behaviors of interest, for example through state machine learning or genetic algorithms; (iv) adding new probes and new log messages into the production code to improve its testability.

stamp-wps

Besides this primary line of research, the PhD student will be involved in lines of research led by the other STAMP partners, addressing unit test amplification and configurability test amplification. Furthermore, the PhD student will be involved in case studies and evaluations conducted in collaboration with the industrial partners in the consortium.

From the TU Delft Software Engineering group, several people will be involved, including Arie van Deursen (principal investigator), Andy Zaidman, and Mauricio Aniche. Furthermore, where possible collaborations with existing projects will be setup, such as the 3TU Big Software on the Run and TestRoot projects.

Requirements for the PhD candidate include:

  • Being a team player;
  • Strong writing and presentation skills;
  • Being hungry for new knowledge in software engineering;
  • Ability to develop prototype research tools;
  • Interest in bringing program analysis, testing, and genetic algorithms together;
  • Eagerness to work with the STAMP partners on test amplification in their contexts;
  • Completed MSc degree in computer science

For more information on this vacancy and the STAMP project, please contact Arie van Deursen.

To apply, please follow the instructions of the official opening at the TU Delft Vacancies pages. Your letter letter should include a clear motivation why you want to work on the STAMP project, and an explanation of what you can bring to the STAMP project. Also provide your CV, (pointers to) written material (e.g. a term paper, an MSc thesis, or published conference or journal papers), and if possible pointers to (open source) software projects you have contributed to.

The vacancy will be open until 2 February 2017, but applying early never hurts. We look forward to receiving your application!