The Bug Wars Research Experience for Undergraduates Site is now accepting applications for 8 positions to start in Summer 2014. More information is available HERE.
Bug Wars is an REU site project that exposes students to research on software testing and AI planning through both competition and collaboration. The intellectual merit of this project includes creating new knowledge about user-session-based testing, model-based testing with AI planning, and the combination of these two techniques as applied to web applications. A novel feature of this REU is that it encourages both competition and collaboration. The students initially split into two teams that strive to find the most faults in web application systems under test. One team collects, reduces, and prioritizes user-session-based test suites. A second team uses machine learning to build models of the software and AI planning to generate test suites. Students compete to show the merits of their approach on the same systems by considering the sizes and fault detection effectiveness (FDE) of their test suites. The students then critically discuss their work and propose combining the different approaches to further improve effectiveness.