ESQuaReD, or The Laboratory for Empirically-based Software Quality Research and Development, is the software engineering group at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln∞. The group is part of the Computer Science and Engineering Department∞ at the university. The E² lab is located on the city campus of the University, in Avery Hall. The main laboratory is in rooms 103 and 104, with faculty offices located on the first and third floors.

Members of the E² Laboratory are actively involved in the software engineering research community. In a recent ranking of International Software Engineering Scholars∞ E² fared well; Gregg Rothermel tied for 1st, Matt Dwyer tied for 28th, and Sebastian Elbaum was 50th in the world. Since E² came into existence in 2004, the same ranking system places it 5th in the world as a group.




People:

• Suzette Person∞ completed her Doctorate and has taken a position at NASA Langley Research Center.
• Madeline Diep∞ completed her Doctorate and has taken a position at the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering.
• Myra Cohen∞ has received an Air Force Young Investigator award∞.
• Marc Fisher II∞ completed his Doctorate and has taken a post-doc at Virginia Tech.
• Zhimin Wang∞ completed his Doctorate and has taken a position at Microsoft.
• Witawas Srisa-an∞ has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.
• Joe Ruthruff∞ completed his Doctorate and has taken a research position at Sandia National Labs.
• Myra Cohen∞ has received an NSF CAREER award∞.
• Matt Dwyer∞ has been named an ACM Distinguished Scientist∞.
• Ahyoung Sung has joined us as a Research Scientist funded by the Korea Research Foundation.
• Myra Cohen∞ gave a keynote at the International Workshop on Software Product Line Testing∞.
• Gregg Rothermel∞ gave a keynote at the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement∞.
• Hyunsook Do∞ completed her Doctorate and has taken a faculty position at North Dakota State University.

Recent Publications:

Conference Papers (with just the E² authors listed)

• APSEC 2009∞; Zhihong Xu and Gregg Rothermel : "Directed Test Suite Augmentation".
• ICSM 2009∞; Guowei Yang, Matt Dwyer, and Gregg Rothermel : "Regression Model Checking".
• ESEC/FSE 2009∞
  • Elena Sherman, Matthew Dwyer, and Sebastian Elbaum : "Saturation-based Testing of Concurrent Programs"
  • Sebastian Elbaum : "Whitening SOA Testing"
• VL/HCC 2009∞; Kathryn Stolee, Sebastian Elbaum, and Gregg Rothermel: "Revealing the Copy and Paste Habits of End Users".
• ISSTA 2009∞; Myra Cohen: "Incremental Covering Array Failure Characterization in Large Configuration Spaces".
• ECRTS 2009∞; Haitao Zhu, Matthew Dwyer, and Steve Goddard: "Predictable Runtime Monitoring".
• ISMM 2009∞; Xiaohua Guan, Witawas Srisa-an, and Chenghuan Jia: "Investigating the Effects of Using Different Nursery Sizing Policies on Performance".
• SSBSE 2009∞; Brady Garvin, Myra Cohen, and Matthew Dwyer: "An Improved Meta-Heuristic Search for Constrainted Interaction Testing".
• FSE 2008∞
  • Gregg Rothermel : "An Empirical Study of the Effect of Time Constraints on the Cost-Benefits of Regression Testing"
  • Zhimin Wang and Sebastian Elbaum : "Model-Based Fault Detection in Context-Aware Adaptive Applications"
  • Suzette Person, Matthew Dwyer, and Sebastian Elbaum : "Differential Symbolic Execution"
  • Andhy Koesnandar, Sebastian Elbaum, Gregg Rothermel, Lorin Hochstein, and Kathryn Stolee : "Using Assertions to Help End-User Programmers Create Dependable Web Macros"
• OOPSLA 2008∞; Feng Xian, Witawas Srisa-an, and Hong Jiang: "Contention Aware Scheduler: Unlocking Execution Parallelism in Multithreaded Java Programs"
• ASE 2008∞
  • Matthew Jorde, Sebastian Elbaum, and Matthew Dwyer: "Increasing Test Granularity by Aggregating Unit Tests"
  • Matthew Dwyer, Madeline Diep, and Sebastian Elbaum: "Reducing the Cost of Path Property Monitoring Through Sampling"
• ISSTA 2008∞
  • Suzette Person : "Combining Unit-level Symbolic Execution and System-level Concrete Execution for Testing NASA Software"
  • Gregg Rothermel : "Using Sensitivity Analysis to Create Simplified Economic Models for Regression Testing"
  • Xiao Qu, Myra Cohen, and Gregg Rothermel: "Configuration-Aware Regression Testing"
• ICSE 2008∞; Joe Ruthruff, Sebastian Elbaum, and Gregg Rothermel : "Predicting Accurate and Actionable Static Analysis Warnings: An Experimental Approach" (Distinguished Paper Award)
• ASE 2007∞
  • Matt Dwyer and Rahul Purandare: "Residual Dynamic Typestate Analysis"
  • Madeline Diep, Sebastian Elbaum, and Matt Dwyer: "Reducing Irrelevant Trace Variations" (short paper)
  • Myra Cohen : "Covering Array Sampling of Input Event Sequences for Automated GUI Testing" (short paper)
• ICSM 2007∞; Xiao Qu, Myra Cohen and Katherine Woolf: "Combinatorial Interaction Regression Testing: a Study of Test Case Generation and Prioritization"
• OOPSLA 2007∞; Feng Xian, Witawas Srisa-an and Hong Jiang: "Microphase: An Approach to Proactively Invoking Garbage Collection for Improved Performance"
• ISMM 2007∞; Feng Xian, Witawas Srisa-an and Hong Jiang: "Allocation-Phase Aware Thread Scheduling Policies to Improve Garbage Collection Performance"
• TAIC-PART 2007∞; Myra Cohen, Matt Dwyer, and Jiangfan Shi: "Exploiting constraint solving history to construct interaction test suites"
• ECOOP 2007∞; Feng Xian, Witawas Srisa-an, Chenghuan Jia and Hong Jiang: "AS-GC: An Efficient Generational Garbage Collector for Java Application Servers"
• ISSTA 2007∞; Myra Cohen, Matt Dwyer, and Jiangfan Shi: "Interaction Testing of Highly-configurable Systems in the Presence of Constraints"
• ICSE 2007∞
  • Matt Dwyer, Sebastian Elbaum, Suzette Person, and Rahul Purandare: "Parallel Randomized State-space Search"
  • Matt Dwyer, Alex Kinneer, and Sebastian Elbaum: "Adaptive Online Program Analysis"
  • Zhimin Wang, Sebastian Elbaum, and David Rosenblum: "Automated Generation of Context-Aware Tests"
  • Sebastian Elbaum, Suzette Person, Jon Dokulil, and Matt Jorde: “Bug Hunt: Making Early Software Testing Lessons Engaging and Affordable” (Education track)
  • Alex Kinneer, Matt Dwyer, and Gregg Rothermel: "Sofya: Supporting Rapid Development of Dynamic Program Analyses for Java" (Research demonstration track)
  • Matt Dwyer : "Formal Software Analysis : Emerging Trends in Software Model Checking" (Future of Software Engineering track)
• FASE 2007∞; Marc Fisher, Sebastian Elbaum, and Gregg Rothermel: "Dynamic Characterization of Web Application Interfaces"

Journal Papers (with just the E² authors listed)

• IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Myra Cohen, Matt Dwyer and Jiangfan Shi: September 2008∞
  • Sebastian Elbaum and Matt Dwyer: January 2009∞
• ACM TOPLAS; Matt Dwyer: August 2007∞

Community:

• Matt Dwyer was elected to serve as Vice Chair of SIGSOFT∞ from 2009 through 2012.
• Gregg Rothermel is General Chair of ISSTA 2009∞.
• We chaired the programs of ICSE 2008∞ (Matt Dwyer), ESEM 2008∞ (Sebastian Elbaum), ICSE 2007∞ (Gregg Rothermel), ISSTA 2007∞ (Sebastian Elbaum), and FASE 2007∞ (Matt Dwyer).

Projects:

• Sebastian Elbaum and Matt Dwyer have a new NSF funded project∞ starting in 2009.
• Matt Dwyer and Sebastian Elbaum have a new NASA funded project starting in 2008.
• Witty Srisa-an has a new NSF funded project∞ starting in 2007.
• Matt Dwyer, Sebastian Elbaum, and Steve Goddard have a new NSF funded project∞ starting in 2007.
• If you experiment with software testing and analysis techniques, check out the Software-artifact Infrastructure Repository∞

(For more developments involving the E², please visit our recent news page.)