Colloquium: Mark Grechanik
Starts: November 13, 2009 at 3:00 PM
Location: McGlothlin-Street 020
Contact: Department of Computer Science
Summary
Preserving Test Coverage While Achieving Data Anonymity For Database-Centric Applications
Full Description
Database-centric applications (DCAs) are common in enterprise computing, and they use nontrivial databases as part of their logic. Testing of DCAs is increasingly outsourced to testing centers in order to achieve lower cost and better quality. When releasing proprietary DCAs, its databases should also be made available to test engineers so that they can test using real data. However, since these databases contain sensitive information, they cannot be disclosed to anyone outside the organizations that own these DCAs. Currently, testing is performed with fake data that often leads to worse code coverage and fewer uncovered bugs, thereby reducing the quality of applications and obliterating benefits of test outsourcing.
In this talk Mark will describe a novel approach for Testing Applications with Data Anonymization (TaDa). With TaDa, DCAs can be released to external testing organizations without disclosing sensitive information while retaining testing efficacy. We built a tool and applied it to nontrivial Java applications. Our results show that TaDa is effective and efficient at automatically anonymizing different databases, while preserving a higher level of test coverage.
Biography
Mark Grechanik is a Research Manager with the Accenture Technology Labs where he leads a research group in software reuse and testing, and he is an Adjunct Professor at the department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Chicago and DePaul University. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the department of Computer Sciences of the University of Texas at Austin. In parallel with his academic activities, Mark worked for over 20 years as a software consultant for startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Mark’s research focuses on increasing programmers' productivity by automating various activities at different stages of the development lifecycle. In his research, Mark utilizes various techniques from software engineering, language design, program analysis, and machine learning to address specific issues that affect programmers when they design, debug, and test software. Mark received the best paper award at ICST 2009. He is a recipient of the NSF award on the collaborative proposal with Denys Poshyvanyk and he is a member of the ACM SigSoft Executive Committee.
