Modern software systems, in particular when successful, undergo continuous change and therefore require a continuous accompanying quality control at the system level. Today’s testing technology does not sufficiently address this problem as it requires substantial ongoing manual effort. Learning-based testing promises a practical way out. Key to this approach is the combination of the common practice of a periodic system test, monitoring, and model-based text generation, steered and controlled by automatically inferred system models. The talk will consider the history and the state of the art, impact, and perspective of the underlying active automata learning technology, tools and platforms. In particular, it will present promising applications scenarios, ranging from mere specification mining over validation of platform-independence of applications to monitoring-controlled system evolution. Learning-based testing, by its nature, cannot guarantee the correctness of a system, as the inferred models steering the testing process are just concise aggregations of the test history. Its high degree of automation, on the other hand, supports a life-long learning approach that serves for steadily increasing confidence. Fielded applications range from digital twins extraction to neurosymbolic ML.

Prof. Tiziana Margaria is Chair of Software Systems at the University of Limerick. She leads the digital manufacturing Platform within the Research Ireland funded I-Form Centre for advanced manufacturing and she is a co-director of the National Centre of Research Training in AI. She works on neurosymbolic approaches to create connected digital IT spaces (data, processes, machines, and their interoperability) and on explainable AI for case-by-case auditable high assurance systems. This combines various kinds of formal methods and deterministic reasoning with suitable AI and ML technologies. Her current Research Ireland project on Low-code-No-code platform development devotes over 5 Mio Euro to a formal methods-embedded platform that makes high assurance software application development sustainable and accessible to non-programmers. Tiziana is currently President of the Irish Computing Society (ICS), Vice President of the European Association of Software Science and Technology (EASST); steering committee member of ETAPS. She is past President of FMICS (the ERCIM Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems) and current Chair of the IFIP WG 1.9/2.15 on Verified Software.

Contact her at tiziana.margaria@ul.ie