The Future of Software Testing

Robert Bauer

Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Networking Dinner @ 5:45; Bootcamp @ 6:15; Business @ 6:45; Program @ 7:00 PM

at Countrywide, 2900 Madera, Simi Valley, CA 93065

In the formal methods community, software verification means to prove that a given software system is correct with respect to its specification. Engineers and managers in software Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Engineering (QE) have a different problem: Increasingly complex software that needs to be "tested" in ever decreasing amounts of time. Even if you prove that some software system is correct (with respect to its specification), you still need to test the software system. This does not mean that the techniques of formal methods are "orthogonal" with those used by QA/QE teams. It means that QA/QE teams will be more effective if they understand the ideas and limitations of formal methods. QA/QE teams can incorporate many of the concepts and even the techniques themselves within the test environment.

While many practices of formal methods are quite mathematical and complicated, the techniques themselves are quite simple. This talk gives a high-level overview of these techniques and shows how they apply at a very practical level to the problems faced by QA/QE teams.

Robert T. Bauer has over 20 years of industry experience. Robert has worked in research labs and in real-world business application development. At NCR he developed a wide-variety of software to support large-scale testing of the Teradata database. His Parallel Test Environment (PTE) is now the standard testing environment at NCR and is being used at the 5 Teradata development centers. Robert is well known in the software quality community for his contributions to software testing. He developed a testing strategy called Customer-Based Testing. This strategy combines software reliability engineering, automatic test case generation, and usage coverage to minimize the risk of expensive failures and to maximize assurance of base functionality.

Robert also has 20 years of teaching experience and has been an adjunct and associate professor at Chapman College, National University, Portland State University and the Oregon Graduate Institute. He has taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes. He has been designated as a Master Training Specialist by formal board action of the Chief of Naval Training. (This designation is earned by less than 0.5% of all military instructors). Robert is a well-known lecturer who has given many talks on a wide variety of quality assurance and testing topics.

Robert has undergraduate degrees in E.E. and I.T (Magna Cum Laude) from SIU as well as a Master's in Theoretical Computer Science from Loyola. Robert is completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Portland State University in the area of Formal Semantics.