Keynote Talk at Chinese National Symposium on Software Analysis and Testing (SAT 2015)

1. Impact-Driven Research on
Software EngineeringTooling
Tao Xie
University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, USA
taoxie@illinois.edu
http://taoxie.cs.illinois.edu/

2. http://taoxie.cs.illinois.edu/publications/cccf15-industryacademia.pdf

3.  #Papers 
 #InternationalVenue Papers 
 #SCI/EI Papers 
 #CCF A (B/C) Category Papers 
 ???
CRA 2015 Report:
“Hiring Recommendation. Evaluate candidates on the basis of the contributions in their
top one or two publications, …”
“Tenure and Promotion Recommendation. Evaluate candidates for tenure and promotion
on the basis of the contributions in their most important three to five publications
(where systems and other artifacts may be included).”
http://cra.org/resources/bp-view/best_practices_memo_evaluating_scholarship_in_hiring_tenure_and_promot/

4.  Research impact: inspiring/impactful
ideas/directions/subareas… for researchers
 Example: model checking
 Practice impact: Practice adoption of
tools/systems/technologies… for practitioners
 Some examples discussed in this talk
 Societal impact: inspiring/impactful
ideas/thinking/awareness… for general public
 Example: computational thinking, privacy, medical-
device security, MOOCs, …

5.  Publishing research results  technologies
there adopted by companies, e.g.,
ICSE 00 Daikon paper by Ernst et al.  Agitar Agitator
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/pubs/invariants-relevance-icse2000.pdf
ASE 04 Rostra paper by Xie et al.  Parasoft Jtest improvement
http://taoxie.cs.illinois.edu/publications/ase04.pdf
PLDI/FSE 05 DART/CUTE papers by Sen et al.  MSR SAGE, Pex
http://srl.cs.berkeley.edu/~ksen/papers/dart.pdf
http://srl.cs.berkeley.edu/~ksen/papers/C159-sen.pdf

6.  Commercializing research results in startup 
tools/products used by companies, e.g.,
Having a startup ! leading to huge adoption

7.  Release open source infrastructures or libraries
to engage academic/industry communities to
use and contribute, e.g.,
▪ MPI/PETSc by Bill Gropp et al.
▪ Charm++ by Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale et al.
▪ LLVM byVikram Adve, Chris Lattner, et al.
“The openness of the LLVM technology and the quality of its
architecture and engineering design are key factors in
understanding the success it has had both in academia and
industry.”

8.  Making infrastructure available for academia to
build upon, e.g.,
NikolaiTillmann, Jonathan de Halleux, andTao Xie.Transferring anAutomatedTest GenerationTool to
Practice: From Pex to Fakes andCode Digger. In Proceedings of the 29th IEEE/ACM International
Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2014), ExperiencePapers
http://taoxie.cs.illinois.edu/publications/ase14-pexexperiences.pdf
http://research.microsoft.com/pex/

9.  Making data available
▪ inside the company (visiting professors,
student interns)
▪ to academia
Kika Emoji Keyboard
http://research.microsoft.com/codehunt/

10. http://research.microsoft.com/pex/
http://research.microsoft.com/codehunt
http://research.microsoft.com/pex4fun/

11. http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/

12. http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/

13. http://checkerframework.org/

14. http://checkerframework.org/

15. http://checkerframework.org/

16. http://checkerframework.org/

17. http://www.kframework.org/

18.  …
 TOOLS Asia 1998
 WCC 2000
 COMPSAC 2001
 …
 FSE’04, ICSE’04 (Distinguished Paper Award)
 …
 Many papers in ICSE/FSE/ASE…
 What next?

19.  Look up (follower) 
 Look around (peer) 
 Leader
 How to accomplish that?

20.  Access to real world data
 Including ease of conducting user studies
 Technology transfer/adoption, practice impact
 Strong engineering teams
 Willingness of industry to cooperate
 “Big” concept/vision, subfield
 With concrete convincing “meat”

21. Strategist
Thinker
Researcher
General
Ideas/Principles,
School of
Thoughts, …
Keynote/inspiring/visionary
talks
…
What is the beauty of XXX?
Conference talks
…
What is the advantage of XXX?

22. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/sa/

23. IEEE Computer 2012
IEEE Software 2015 Special Issue
IEEETSC 2016 Special Issue
http://www.internetware.org/

24.  Start a startup
 but desirable to have right people (e.g., former students) to
start
 Release free tools/libraries to aim for adoption
 but a lot of efforts to be invested on “non-researchy” stuffs
 Collaborate with industrial research labs
 but many research lab projects may look like univ. projects
 Collaborate with industrial product groups
 but many probs faced by product groups may not be
“researchy”

25.  NikolaiTillmann, Jonathan de Halleux, and Tao Xie. Transferring an Automated Test Generation
Tool to Practice: From Pex to Fakes and Code Digger. In Proceedings of ASE 2014, Experience
Papers. http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/publications/ase14-pexexperiences.pdf
 Jian-Guang Lou, Qingwei Lin, Rui Ding, Qiang Fu, Dongmei Zhang, and Tao Xie. Software Analytics
for Incident Management of Online Services: An Experience Report. In Proceedings ASE 2013,
Experience Paper. http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/publications/ase13-sas.pdf
 Dongmei Zhang, Shi Han,Yingnong Dang, Jian-Guang Lou, Haidong Zhang, andTao Xie. Software
Analytics in Practice. IEEE Software, Special Issue on the Many Faces of Software Analytics, 2013.
http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/publications/ieeesoft13-softanalytics.pdf
 Yingnong Dang, Dongmei Zhang, Song Ge, Chengyun Chu,Yingjun Qiu, and Tao Xie. XIAO:Tuning
Code Clones at Hands of Engineers in Practice. In Proceedings of ACSAC 2012.
http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/publications/acsac12-xiao.pdf

26. Questions ?
https://sites.google.com/site/asergrp/