This funding establishes a new CISE Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Utah State University. The project, called Bug Wars, exposes students to research on software testing and AI planning through both competition and collaboration. This project will create 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 of their test suites. The students then critically discuss their work and propose combining the different approaches to further improve effectiveness.
The broader impacts of this research are that twenty-four students over a three-year period have the opportunity to participate in a supportive environment that encourages them to pursue graduate studies in Computer Science. The students are better prepared for graduate school as they gain basic research skills, including the formulation of research questions, design of experiments, critical evaluation, and written and oral communication.
