亚洲AV

Wing Lam brings home a flaky test achievement

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Getting rewarded for being flaky doesn鈥檛 usually happen. But when it comes to computer science, researching flaky (non-deterministic) software tests resulted in Wing Lam 鈥 professor in the at 亚洲AV 鈥 receiving the .听听

Wing Lam

鈥淚t is a tremendous opportunity to be honored with this award,鈥 says Lam. 鈥淚t makes me reflect on the many tiring nights that I spent on the work in my dissertation and on the dissertation text itself.鈥澨

Lam鈥檚 winning dissertation pinpointed flaky tests, an important topic for software developers. He says these kinds of tests tend to non-deterministically pass or fail on the same code. Basically, the tests flake out and provide unreliable results, which can cause challenges for developers trying to see if their recent code changes introduced software bugs or not.听

鈥淚n recent years, many companies 鈥 like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft 鈥揾ighlighted through research and blogs the difficulties developers face when dealing with flaky tests,鈥 says Lam. 鈥淭he work in my dissertation proposes techniques to help developers detect, understand, and fix them.鈥澨

A fairly new arrival at Mason, Lam has been with the university for about one year. He says he was drawn to Mason鈥檚 influential researchers and strong computer science presence, particularly in the area of software engineering, which he teaches and conducts research in.听

Software engineering at Mason is now ranked seventh in the country, based on publications in recent years according to听鈥 says Lam. 鈥淲ith Mason being close to Washington D.C., there are also many collaboration opportunities and software development companies unique to this region.鈥澨

According to Lam, the work in his dissertation detected more than 3,000 flaky tests in over 300 open-source projects and helped fix more than 1,200 flaky tests in over 170 open-source projects. Lam鈥檚 work also led to changes in Maven Surefire, the default plugin of a popular build system for running tests in Java projects.听听

His changes are part of a toolset that is used by over 6.8 million Java developers worldwide, he says.听

His advice for folks looking to develop an award winning dissertation is to explore anything that is exciting or interesting and learn through the process.听

鈥淭he work in this dissertation took me three years,鈥 says Lam. 鈥淎lthough I explored other related topics, I ended up mainly focusing on flaky tests because of how important this subject is for software developers.鈥澨