Talk of Prof. Lionel Briand on software verification

Talk of Prof. Lionel Briand on software verification

On June 27, Prof. Lionel Briand, head of the Software Verification and Verification Laboratory at the University of Luxembourg, Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, gave a talk on model-based software verification and testing.

The abstract of his presentation:

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

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-publicised 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 modelling, accounting for the specifics of the domain and the modelling objectives, combined with sophisticated search techniques, can help achieve scalability and practicality in a variety of contexts.