Improving the quality of scientific software through rigorous software testing
BSSw Fellow Myra Cohen aims to embed cutting-edge software testing techniques into the scientific software development workflow. Rather than expecting the scientific community to become experts on volumes of software testing principles and techniques, she plans to bring intuitive and non-intrusive approaches to them with short videos, code examples, and tools. Myra’s work focuses on system testing techniques for scientific software, such as ensuring coverage of tests to represent a broad set of behaviors, sampling configurable systems to find faults that appear only under specific combinations of configuration options, and utilizing a representative range of input data. She also studies ways to test software that lacks a known oracle (or expected result) and techniques to test software that is stochastic or probabilistic. Last, she aims to provide an end-user view of scientific software, creating methods for developers to provide explainability and interpretability of configuration choices and their impact on the scientific results.
Myra Cohen is a professor in computer science and holds the Lahn and Oahn Chair of Software Engineering at Iowa State University, where she manages the Laboratory for Variability-Aware Assurance and Testing of Organic Programs (LavaOps). Her research career has been spent developing novel testing and sampling techniques for complex software, including systems that are highly-configurable, scientific, cyber-physical, self-healing and event-driven. She spends some of her time exploring synergies between living organisms and software.
