Transferring Software Testing Tools to Practice

Abstract

Achieving successful technology adoption in practice has often been an important goal for both academic and industrial researchers. However, it is generally challenging to transfer research results into industrial products or into tools that are widely adopted. What are the key factors that lead to practical impact for a research project? This talk presents experiences and lessons learned in successfully transferring tools from two testing projects as collaborative efforts between the academia and industry. In the Pex project (research.microsoft.com/pex) [3], nearly a decade's collaborative efforts between Microsoft Research and academia have led to high-impact tools that are now shipped by Microsoft and adopted by the community. These tools include Fakes [2], a test isolation framework shipped with Visual Studio 2012/2013, IntelliTest, an automatic test generation tool shipped with Visual Studio 2015, and Code Hunt (www.codehunt.com) [1] (evolved from Pex4Fun [4]), a popular serious gaming platform for coding contests and practicing programming skills, which has attracted 350,000+ players from May 2014 to August 2016, and has been adopted in large-scale Microsoft Imagine Cup and Beauty of Programming contests. In the WeChat testing project, recent collaborative efforts [5], [6] between Tencent and academia have developed effective techniques for testing Android apps, by improving Google's Monkey, a popularly used Android testing tool in industry. The developed techniques have been applied to test WeChat, one of world's most popular messenger apps with over 800 million monthly active users.