| EPSRC Reference: |
EP/F033958/1 |
| Title: |
Linguistic Support for Test Development |
| Principal Investigator: |
Mycroft, Professor A |
| Other Investigators: |
|
| Researcher Co-Investigators: |
|
| Project Partners: |
|
| Department: |
Computer Science and Technology |
| Organisation: |
University of Cambridge |
| Scheme: |
Standard Research |
| Starts: |
01 January 2008 |
Ends: |
31 December 2009 |
Value (£): |
149,831
|
| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
| Fundamentals of Computing |
Software Engineering |
|
| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
| No relevance to Underpinning Sectors |
|
|
| Related Grants: |
|
| Panel History: |
| Panel Date | Panel Name | Outcome |
|
06 Dec 2007
|
ICT Prioritisation Panel (Technology)
|
Announced
|
|
|
Summary on Grant Application Form |
|
Computer programs do not preform as reliably as we would like them to. This becomes annually more problematic, as society increasingly relies on computers for business and even safety concerns.Over the last half-century, programming languages have evolved to support better features (e.g. structured programming, object-oriented programming) that encourage clean program design. These improvements aid program reliability.Of course, designing and writing a program is only the first part of building a system; the system then must be tested. While there is a fair degree of theory and practice of testing (program components are tested individually in so-called ``unit tests'', these components are then assembled and whole-system tests are then performed), this procedure is largely informal in that it is largely done by hand, isolated from the design of the software itself.This grant proposal builds on our previous work in testing and in programming language design to argue that software should always be co-developed with its tests, and to do this writing tests must be simplified. This has various advantages. Firstly, expressing the tests in a formalized syntax, directly connected to the program syntax, directs the language to automatically convert the formal specifications into a test suite. Secondly, developing the tests alongside the program increases the likelihood that programmers always update the tests when updating the program -- indeed with the formal specifications we can perform directed analyses, similar to dataflow analysis, to ensure that tests remain exhaustive over updates (according to one of the possible metrics for this).
|
|
Key Findings |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
|
Potential use in non-academic contexts |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
|
Impacts |
|
| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
|
| Date Materialised |
|
|
|
|
Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
| Project URL: |
|
| Further Information: |
|
| Organisation Website: |
http://www.cam.ac.uk |