In May, we launched the second Testing and Verification request for proposals (TAV RFP) in response to the high quality of submissions of last year’s TAV RFP. The winners of the 2018 TAV RFP were invited to a one-day workshop at the 2018 Facebook TAV Symposium to present their winning proposals and network with symposium attendees. Following the success of last year’s model, the 2019 TAV RFP winners are also invited to this year’s TAV Symposium, which will take place in Facebook London on November 20 and 21. For those interested in attending, registration is now open.

For this year’s TAV RFP, we were interested in proposals that tackled any topics on testing and verification with the potential to have profound impact on the tech sector, based on advances on the theory and practice of testing and verification. In particular, we welcomed proposals that tackled test flakiness and pay-as-you-go verification. For more details on these topics, as well as proposal requirements, eligibility, and timing, visit the 2019 TAV RFP page.

The winners have been selected and are listed below. “We are excited that, once again, we received over 100 proposals, and of such high quality,” says Mark Harman, Research Scientist and Facebook TAV co-chair. “We are really excited to see this research develop, and to see the deployment of advanced research in industry.

“Despite doubling the funding available this year, there were many excellent proposals that we were sadly unable to fund this round. Such was the quality of the proposals we received,” says Mark. “We are very grateful to the scientific research community for engaging so enthusiastically with this call for proposals.”

Research award winners

Principal investigators are listed first unless otherwise noted.

A scalable infrastructure for fuzzy-driven root causing of flaky tests
Filomena Ferrucci (University of Salerno), Pasquale Salza (University of Zurich), and Valerio Terragni (Università della Svizzera italiana)

Action-based test carving
Gordon Fraser (University of Passau) and Alessio Gambi (University of Passau)

Cyclic proofs of program incorrectness
James Brotherston (University College London)

Detecting flaky test failures of system user interactive tests
Mike Papadakis (University of Luxembourg), Renaud Rwemalika (University of Luxembourg), and Yves Le Traon (University of Luxembourg)

Moka: Improving app testing with automated mocking
Mattia Fazzini (University of Minnesota), Alessandra Gorla (IMDEA Software Institute), and Alessandro Orso (Georgia Tech)

Null pointer dereferences in the wild
Cindy Rubio Gonzalez (University of California, Davis)

Probabilistic testing in the presence of flaky tests
Weihang Wang (State University of New York — University at Buffalo)

Search-based inducement and repair of latent test flakiness
Philip McMinn (University of Sheffield), Gregory M. Kapfhammer (Allegheny College), Michael Hilton (Carnegie Mellon University), and Owain Parry (University of Sheffield)

Static prediction of test flakiness
Breno Alexandro Ferreira de Miranda (Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil), Antonia Bertolino (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione – CNR), Emilio Cruciani (Gran Sasso Science Institute), and Roberto Verdecchia (Gran Sasso Science Institute)

Test oracle inference — supervised learning over execution traces
Ajitha Rajan (University of Edinburgh)

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To view our currently open research awards and to subscribe to our email list, visit our Research Awards page.