GrammaTech Awarded NSF Research Grant to Develop Dependence Graphs for Unit-Testing Solution

Ithaca, NY — GrammaTech, Inc. announced today that it has been awarded a $99,656 Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Program Phase I grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Upon completion of this six-month contract GrammaTech will be eligible to compete for up to $500,000 in Phase II SBIR funding. Under terms of the agreement, GrammaTech will develop an aspect-oriented solution for unit test generation.

As software systems become more complicated, the problem of testing them effectively gets harder. Unit testing is a methodology for testing small parts of an application independently of whatever application uses them. It is time consuming and tedious to write unit tests, and it is especially difficult to write unit tests that model the pattern of usage of the application they will be used in. It is common for an application to expose a bug in a module that the unit tests for that module missed entirely. GrammaTech’s approach is to monitor the application as it runs its regression tests, and to capture the events at the boundaries of the module of interest. This log of events can then be replayed to a test harness that exercises the module independently of the environment in which it was originally tested. Under this SBIR grant GrammaTech will explore the feasability and utility of such a system.