Topics in Programming Languages: Automated Testing, Bug Detection, and Program Analysis

Software bugs remain pervasive in modern software systems. As software becomes increasingly intertwined in all aspects of our lives, the consequences of these bugs become increasingly severe. For instance, since the mid 2010s, several important security vulnerabilities have emerged from basic correctness bugs in software (e.g. Heartbleed, Cloudbleed, Shellshock ). Though not all bugs cause important security vulnerabilities, their overall cost remains high: one estimate puts the cost of dealing with software failures and defects in the United States alone in 2018 at nearly USD$1,540,000,000---the worldwide impact of these defects is even more severe.

While human-written tests are a prevailing method for assuring the quality of software in practice, they are still subject to human error, and allowing bugs to slip through the cracks that the human tester did not consider. This class will explore topics in the field of automated testing, which aims, at a high-level, to reduce the developer burden in discovering bugs and writing test cases. Recent advances in this field leverage static and dynamic information from the program under test in order to effectively explore the space of behaviors of the program under test, enabling the quick discovery of potentially severe security bugs.

The concerns of scalable bug detection and program debugging require innovation from multiple different fronts. As such, this course will cover papers from Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Security, and Systems venues.

Course-level learning goals

• Describe the problems solved by the following techniques, recognize the scenarios in which each technique can be used, and analyze the pros and cons of each technique, for the following techniques:
  • Test-input generation: blackbox fuzzing, greybox fuzzing, symbolic execution
  • Test oracles: crashing oracles, differential oracles, automated test-oracle generation
  • Property-based testing
  • Whole test-suite generation
  • Pattern-based Static Analysis
  • Fault Localization
  • Dynamic Data Race Detection
• Identify contributions and room for improvement in existing research papers;
• Debate the positives and negatives of existing research papers;
• Categorize and summarize concerns and questions about existing research papers
• Design and conduct the experimental evaluation of a program testing or analysis tool.

This is a seminar-style class, which is primarily driven by in-class discussion of a research paper. Each student is expected to submit a response to the paper being discussed in the class at 4pm the day before the class in which it is discussed. Each student will also serve as discussion lead for 1-2 papers; the discussion lead will read through other students' responses and prepare questions to start the discussion. Around half your course mark comes from participating in discussions and submitting paper responses.

The bulk of your course mark will come from an open-ended course project. There are two options for the course project:

• Research project: propose and conduct a small research project. As it is within the scope of a single academic semester, it may not be a ``full'' project, but more of a preliminary investigation. The project should be structured give you some experience with research implementation, evaluation, or data analysis.
• Open-source contribution: this year I am offering the option to use a contribution to open-source software as the course project. Definitely in scope are contributions that help fuzz testing, software correctness, and software security more broadly. The project should be structured to give you experience on software project planning and implementation.

The project deliverables include an initial proposal, a project check-in, an in-class presentation of the work, and a final report summarizing what has been achieved.

Note this structure is quite distinct from most undergraduate courses which are heavily structured and assessment-driven. The open-ended nature of the responses and the project can be somewhat unsettling if coming straight from heavily structured courses. The goal of this course is to expose students to the field of automated testing, and foster their research abilities, as outlined in the learning goals above.

Grading (Subject to Change)

• Paper Responses: 22.5%
• In-class Participation: 15%
• Discussion Lead: 7.5%
• Project Proposal: 12.5%
• Project Check-in: 2.5%
• Project Presentation: 10%
• Project Writeup: 30%

Note (July 2025): this schedule is provided for your information, to give you an idea of what we might cover! We will likely have fewer papers in the 2025W2 semester, and the order of papers might change.

You will receive zero on any written submission (paper response, proposal, final write-up) that is found to have plagiarised materials. This includes even a single plagiarized sentence. This includes plagiarism from other students, as well as from other research papers. Refer to this page for more details on the definition of plagiarism, and tips on how to avoid it.

There is zero-tolerance for the use of GenAI to generate written materials for the course, including paper responses, project proposals, etc. I.e., writing submitted for the course should be generated by a human. I will always favour short, clear, human-written text, over long amounts of GenAI-written text. You are free to use GenAI for coding tasks in your course project; however, you will need to be able to assess whether the coding task was implemented correctly.

Read each paper to the best of your ability before drafting your paper response. There are two goals to the paper responses:

• Convey your understanding of the paper's core innovations
• Convey your opinion of the paper, in order to spark in-class discussion

• A short paragraph summarizing the paper. What is the problem being tackled? How was it adressed by prior work? What are the innovation(s) proposed in this paper? How are those innovations evaluated?
• Your opinion of the paper, which can be structured in a paragraph or bullet points. Some questions to guide you as you read and write your response:
  • What remains unclear after reading the paper? Are there any clarification questions whose answers would substantially change your opinion of the paper?
  • How does the paper's evaluation match with the proposed problem statement?
  • Do you forsee any barriers to the applicability of the technique proposed in the paper? If so, how could these barriers be overcome?
  • Which technical innovations are most compelling to you?
  • Which problems remain unsolved after this paper?

Similarly, do not use GenAI to create your paper response. It is much more useful to see a response that mentions uncertainty or confusions you faced while reading the paper, than a vague summary of the paper with only high-level questions being asked. Also remember in-class participation is 15% of your course grade: this is measured by your spoken contributions during class. It is easier to make a contribution to the discussion if you have engaged with the paper yourself!

Paper responses must be submitted to the course Piazza at 4:00pm before the class on which they are due. Thus, for Tuesday readings, your paper response should be submitted before 4:00pm on Monday. For Thursday readings, they should be submitted before 4:00pm on Wednesday. This is to give the discussion lead ample time to read the paper responses from other students.

Your paper responses will be submitted as follow-up discussions to each paper's post on the course Piazza. You should not read other students' response before writing your own. After posting your response, you may engage with other students' reponses, e.g. answering a clarification question someone else had.

The course project constitutes the majority of the course grade. We will have a project proposal day ahead of the actual projects being due, so you can hear what fellow students are thinking of working on, propose your project, and form groups.

Research Project Option

The purpose of the project is to give you the opportunity to conduct research in the field of program analysis, debugging, or automated testing, and develop research skills (literature review, experimentation, etc.). I recommend you do the project in groups of 2-4; this will give you the opportunity to conduct a project with broader impact.

The scope of acceptable project topics is broad. You are encouraged to find a project with intersects with your own research interests or topic of specialization. But, your project should touch topics in debugging, program analysis, or testing. You may consider a project where you: develop a new tool for testing/analyzing programs in a particular domain, tweak an existing algorithm, conduct an extensive re-evaluation of an existing tool, reimplement an algorithm in a new domain, or create a benchmark suite. If you are not sure if a project is in scope, feel free to set up a meeting with me prior to submitting the project proposal.

Project Ideas. Here are some sample project ideas, of varying complexity and scope. You need not restrict yourself to these ideas. Feel free to ask me for more details on these.

• Compare the performance of CodaMOSA to a hinting strategy that pulls example code snippets from the existing project code base (rather than invoking an LLM).
• Build a dataset of oss-fuzz found bugs and fixes. Evaluate an existing program repair tool on this dataset.

Previous Year's Projects. Here are some projects from previous years:

• Implementing JaCoCo as a coverage backend to JQF.
• Creating a tool to find NaN poisoning exploits in C/C++. Built on LLVM tooling.
• Creating an automated testing tool (based on property-based testing) for Haskell Rewrite Rules.

Open-Source Contribution Option

In this version of the project, you will develop more software development skills. You will need to identify a relevant issue to fix, estimate the work necessary to conduct this fix, propose success metrics for your fix, conduct the improvements, and evaluate your project around your previously-proposed success metrics.

Propose a contribution to open-source software that improves software correctness/security/performance. Here are a few ideas:

• Find an open issue in a software repository of interest.
• oss-fuzz contributions: e.g. fix an oss-fuzz found vulnerability; integrate a new project into OSS-Fuzz (you'll want more than 1 person for this!)
• security-improving patches of existing software: see the page for details.
• Address a bug you have found, in software you depend on for your research!
• ...some other idea, discuss with Caroline.

In proposing doing a contribution you should clearly describe the problem you want to solve as well as your success metrics . Will you write diverse test cases that currently do not pass, and ensure they pass after your improvements? Or a regression test suite if you are making a security/performance improvement that should not have an effect on the software? Perhaps the issue has suggested success metrics already? If the scope of the contribution is large, consider intermediate success metrics.

At the end of term, evaluate your project against these success metrics. If any unexpected issues made you unable to meet these metrics. If you have met all your success metrics, and are confident the contribution improves the state of the project (multiple team members can help with this!), the contribution can be submitted to maintainers before the end of the course.

You will serve as discussion lead for one paper in the class. As a discussion lead, you do not need to submit a response to the paper being read on Piazza. However, you should read the paper in detail, as you will be the "goto" person for clarification questions during discussion. Read through other students' responses, and identify common themes and interesting questions.

• A 10-15 minute summary of the key technical contributions of the paper. You may make a slide deck or use the whiteboard. Caroline will by default project the paper for reference during discussion.
• Identify 3 common themes, future work suggestions, or points of contention from your reading and the other students' responses. Be prepared to briefly explain these to jump-start discussion.
• Identify any clarification questions from your own reading of the paper and other students' reponses. If you are not able to fully clarify some of the questions, feel free to point this out! Collect the parts of paper/related work you had difficulty understanding. We can work together as a group to clarify the questions.