Titulo Estágio
REST in Chaos: Intelligent Testing of Services
Áreas de especialidade
Sistemas Inteligentes
Engenharia de Software
Local do Estágio
DEI-FCTUC
Enquadramento
REST Web Services are now being used in business-critical systems to support application communication in highly demanding environments. In such environments, an application failure might turn into severe safety incidents, might represent large financial costs, or even reputation costs. Verification and Validation activities (V&V) and namely Testing play an important role. Many of current approaches that try to verify quality properties of systems, like robustness or resilience, are rule-based, some are system-specific, and many others rely on expert knowledge to trigger failures on the systems under test. These aspects make it difficult to have automatic approaches for which artificial intelligence / evolutionary approaches have not been fully explored.
Objetivo
The goal of this work is a demanding one that sits at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Software Engineering practices. We intend to design and implement a tool that is able to read a REST API description in Swagger/OpenAPI and automatically generate call parameters that are able to trigger services failures. The description may also be incomplete or described in a semi-structured form, which means that the invalid / malicious calls and other advanced aspects, like operation dependencies, must be intelligently determined. The student will explore evolutionary computing techniques (for example, genetic algorithms) for generating valid inputs and determine their applicability to REST. The application of basic Natural Language Processing techniques will also be helpful in creating a higher quality tool.
In practice, the expected outcome of this internship is:
• A software tool that allows a developer to generate valid calls to a REST service.
• A research paper, to be submitted and presented at a top international conference, describing the tool, its underlying mechanisms, and tests results.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
[Some tasks might overlap; M=Month]
T1 (M1 – M2): Knowledge transfer and state of the art review on software testing and evolutionary computing.
T2 (M3) Application of evolutionary computing algorithms using a preliminary set of Swagger/OpenAPI descriptions.
T3 (M3–M4): Design of the preliminary architecture of the tool.
T4 (M4) Implementation of a small proof-of-concept prototype.
T5 (M5): Writing the Intermediate report.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
[Some tasks might overlap; M=Month]
T6 (M6): Integration of the intermediate defense comments.
T7 (M6–M7) Application of evolutionary algorithms to imperfect Swagger/OpenAPI descriptions. This may involve application of Natural Language Processing for higher quality outcomes.
T8 (M8): Execution of tests and analysis of results.
T9 (M9): Write a research paper and submission to a top international conference in the Dependability or Services areas (IEEE/IFIP Dependable Systems and Networks (dsn.org), IEEE International Conferences on Web Services (conferences.computer.org/icws), International Symposium on Software reliability Engineering (issre.net), etc.).
T10 (M10): Writing the thesis.
Condições
– This proposal is associated with a scholarship of 798 EUR per Month, during at least 6 months (i.e. a total of 4788 EUR), for which the student may apply.
– Plus, it will possible to extend the scholarship duration, depending on the student’s performance.
The selected student will be integrated in the Software and Systems Engineering group of CISUC and the work will be carried out in the facilities of the Department of Informatics Engineering at the University of Coimbra (CISUC - Software and Systems Engineering Group), where a work place and all necessary computer resources will be provided.
Observações
Please contact the advisors: Nuno Laranjeiro (cnl@dei.uc.pt) or Nuno Lourenço (naml@dei.uc.pt) for any questions about this proposal.
Orientador
Nuno Laranjeiro, Nuno Lourenço
cnl@dei.uc.pt 📩