Prof. Dr. Lionel Briand

"Scalable and Cost-Effective Model-Based Software Verification and Testing"

( "IESE Distinguished Lecture Series" in co-operation with the Department of Computer Science)

Automating software verification and testing is a necessity for complex, time-constrained, and high-dependability software systems. Over the last decade, there have been many research efforts whose goal is to automate the software verification and testing process based on models of the system under test or its environment. Little of this research has made it to practice except for a few well-publicized but limited cases.

In this talk, I will describe various attempts to make model-based testing and verification more scalable and practical, reflecting on ten years of collaborative research with the industry in various application domains. I will argue that coping with the scale and complexity of real systems often requires dramatically different approaches than what is commonly reported in the academic literature, showing once again the pervasive gap that exists between software research and practice. Among other things, I will illustrate how dedicated modeling, accounting for the specifics of the domain and the modeling objectives, combined with sophisticated search techniques, can help achieve scalability and practicality in a variety of contexts.

For further information about the series, the dates, and the individual lectures as well as about the lecturers and the registration, please visit http://www.iese.fraunhofer.de/dls.

Bio: Lionel C. Briand is professor and FNR PEARL chair in software verification and validation at the SnT Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust, University of Luxembourg. Lionel started his career as a software engineer in France (CS Communications & Systems) and has conducted applied research in collaboration with industry for more than 20 years.

Until moving to Luxembourg in January 2012, he founded and was heading the Certus Center for Software Verification and Validation at Simula Research Laboratory in Norway, where he was leading applied research projects in collaboration with industrial partners. Before that, he was on the faculty of the department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, where he was a full professor and held the Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Software Quality Engineering. He has also been head of the department Software Quality Engineering at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Germany, and worked as a research scientist for the Software Engineering Laboratory, a consortium of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CSC, and the University of Maryland, USA.

Lionel has been on the program, steering, or organization committees of many international, IEEE and ACM conferences. He is the co-editor-in-chief of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) and is a member of the editorial boards of Systems and Software Modeling (Springer) and Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability (Wiley). He was on the board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering from 2000 to 2004.

Lionel was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for his work on the testing of object-oriented systems.

He was recently granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills Award for his work on model-based verification and testing. His research interests include: model-driven development, testing and verification, search-based software engineering, and empirical software engineering.