The Netherlands : PhD student STRESS project

Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Department of Mathematics and Computer science

Eindhoven, (Noord-Brabant), 40 hours per week

Job description
STRESS project
STRESS is an acronym for: Statistical Testing and Reliability Estimation of Software Systems. The project started in 2005 and is focused on methods for release testing of software systems. A release test is concerned with the question: can we release the software system now, or do we have to continue testing. This is one of the most important questions for software engineers in practice. We all know that complex software systems are never error free, however we can’t test a system exhaustively since that would require ages. Therefore we are looking for statistical release tests that guarantee a certain level of confidence that the system does not contain more than a given number of remaining errors. (This number may be zero)

So far we studied black box testing methods, where the software is considered as a black box and we studied methods for the case a model of the software system is known (see the references). The STRESS project is performed by a research group including one PhD student, who is concentrating on the statistical aspects. There is room for a second PhD student with a computer science background.
There are many open questions but for this PhD position we focus on:

1. Modeling software systems for test purposes;
2. Design of test procedures;
3. Development of a test environment to experiment with the test procedures in order to determine there quality.

For modeling we used so far transition system models. We would like to extend this to more realistic models based for instance on the architecture of the software. The test procedures so far are a mixture of an efficient exhaustive testing strategy combined with a statistical stopping rule. For more realistic cases these rules can be modified in order to be applicable, but then the statistical quality is not guaranteed anymore. In order to determine there quality we need extensive experiments. The experimental environment should be implemented on a grid computing platform. The actual performance of experiments is also part of the project.

Requirements
Required education/skills:University Graduate

We are looking for a brilliant candidate who meets the following requirements:

• a MSc in Computer Science;
• a basic background in statistics;
• who likes to combine more theoretical work with practical software engineering of the test environment and the execution of the experiments;
• good communicative skills in English, both written and oral.

Job type: Research / Advising
Workfield(s):
- Teaching & Research

Organization
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
Department of Mathematics and Computer science

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science provides undergraduate and MSc programs in Mathematics and in Computer Science. The department has research collaborations with other departments at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven as well as with a large number of other universities and companies, both at home and abroad. The Department has approximately 350 employees and more than 700 students.

Conditions of employment
Estimated maximum salary per month: eur 2000 - 2500
Employment basis: Temporary for specified period
Duration of the contract: 4 jaar
Maximum hours per week: 40

Additional Information
Additional information about the vacancy can be obtained from:

Prof. dr. K.M. van Hee
Telephone number: 31(0)402474518

Or ms. P.J. Evers BC
Telephone number: 31(0)402472321
E-mail address: p.j.evers@tue.nl

Or additional information can be obtained through the following link:

• About the organization (http://www.tue.nl)

Application
You can apply for this job before 30-09-2008 (dd-mm-yyyy) by sending your application to:

Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
Eindhoven University of Technology
Postbus 513
5600 MB Eindhoven
Nederland
E-mail: pwzin@tue.nl

When applying for this job always mention the vacancynumber V32.026.

Further Details