We are at an exciting time in the history of the development of software Testing and Verification (TAV). Research is increasingly impacting the tech sector, with many recent examples of breakthroughs, deployment, and adoption. Facebook is playing its own role in the deployment and further development of TAV research with initiatives such as Infer, Sapienz, and Zoncolan, which are well known. But the tech sector as a whole is also actively working on deployment and development of TAV research.

Continuing the success of last year’s software Testing and Verification research awards, Facebook has launched another research award opportunity to encourage further innovation in software Testing and Verification and to deepen our collaboration with academia. The request for proposals was announced at a luncheon at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

We are interested in proposals that tackle any topics on Testing and Verification that have the potential to have profound impact on the tech sector, based on advances on the theory and practice of testing and verification, and in particular, we welcome proposals that tackle the following:

• Test flakiness. This includes, but is not limited to, proposals for measuring, reducing, managing, and coping better with flakiness; reformulations of previously proposed testing approaches, e.g., in regression testing, test generation, oracles, etc., that are aware of (or less susceptible to) unavoidable flakiness; theories and techniques for ameliorating the harmful effect of test flakiness.
• Pay-as-you-go verification. Usually, verification techniques are all or nothing: One gets value only after having specified dependencies and constructed a proof. Ideally, one should get value from verification activities proportional to the effort put in in a way that allows the ideal of fully proven code to be approximated and improved steadily, with measurable value.

We anticipate granting 10 awards, each in the $50,000 range.

Visit the software testing and verification research awards page to apply and for information about eligibility, timing, dates, and what a proposal should include. The application deadline is July 26, 2019.

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