Dr Valerio Terragni has been awarded a Facebook Research grant of 100,000 USD.

This grant will enable Valerio to investigate new methods to automatically test Web Enable Simulations of the FaceBook platform! He will be recruiting a PhD student to work with him and the co-PIs on this project. Please contact Valerio if you are interested in joining this project.
For more information about this PhD opportunity visit https://valerio-terragni.github.io/phd-position-metamorphic-testing-auckland/

Research abstract: Cyber–cyber digital twins present exciting and important opportunities for simulation-based testing of social networks. Facebook has recently deployed MIA (Metamorphic Interaction Automaton) to test a Web Enabled Simulation (WES) of the Facebook platform. MIA relies on manually-crafted metamorphic relations to address the unknowable oracle problem. However, identifying metamorphic relations is a costly and labor intensive activity.Indeed, many metamorphic relations might exist – currently unknown to Facebook engineers – that capture behaviors and properties of Social Networks that are useful to expose platform faults. To address this limitation, we propose to adapt our recent technique GAssertMRs [ESEC/FSE 2021] to automatically generate metamorphic relations in WESs. GAssertMRs is an extension of our previous work GAssert [ESEC/FSE 2020]. GAssert presents a co-evolutionary algorithm to automatically improve/generate assertion oracles for software testing. We recently adapted GAssert into GAssertMRs to generate metamorphic relations in the context of a simulation of an industrial elevator dispatching algorithm from one of the largest elevator companies in Europe. In this proposal we discuss the opportunities and challenges to adapt GAssertMRs to a WES.

For more information about the grant, check here the announcement of the winners.