My research interests are in the area of Software Engineering . Specifically, my research focusses on the development of Dynamic Program Analysis techniques for addressing research problems in Software Testing and Automated Debugging. Software testing is the primary technique used in industry to improve the reliability of software before it is released. However, software testing is tedious and expensive and accounts for as much as 50% of the typical cost of software development. While software testing exposes presence of errors, the next major challenge is to understand the causes of failures and develop bug fixes. To assist in this time consuming and tedious task, there is a great need for developing automated debugging techniques.

The overall goal of my research is to develop practical dynamic program analysis techniques based on rigorous theoretical foundations to address fundamental research problems in the areas of software testing and automated debugging. In particular, these research problems include testing and verification of the runtime behavior of software, and in case of a failure, automatically localizing the failure-causing code and possibly also automatically generating one or more code modifications that would cause the failure to go away. Towards this goal, I have developed dynamic program analysis based techniques for software testing and debugging that draw upon several different areas including numerical analysis, predicate logic, theory of program verification using weakest precondition, design of algorithms and statistical analysis.

Publications

Publishing in Computer Science: "Choosing a venue: conference or journal'' by Michael D. Ernst, Associate Professor, MIT.

Peer Reviewed Journal Papers and Book Chapters

1. Dennis Jeffrey and Neelam Gupta,
   ``Experiments with Test Case Prioritization Using Relevant Slices," accepted to appear in
   the Journal on Systems and Software (JSS) for a Special Issue on Model-Based
   Software Testing, 26 pages. (In Press)
   Only 8 papers were accepted for publication in this Special Issue of the Journal of Systems
   and Software out of a total of 43 submitted papers. Acceptance Rate: 18.6% (8/43)

2. Dennis Jeffrey and Neelam Gupta
   ``Improving Fault Detection Capability by Selectively Retaining Test Cases During Test
   Suite Reduction,'' in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE),
   pages 108-123, vol. 33, no. 2, February 2007.

3. Xiangyu Zhang, Neelam Gupta, and Rajiv Gupta
   ``Locating Faulty Code By Multiple Points Slicing,''
   Software - Practice & Experience (SPE) Journal, vol. 37, issue 9, pages 935-961, July 2007.

4. Xiangyu Zhang, Neelam Gupta, and Rajiv Gupta
   ``A Study of Effectiveness of Dynamic Slicing in Locating Real Faults,''
   Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2, pages 143-160, April 2007.

5. Xiangyu Zhang, Neelam Gupta, and Rajiv Gupta,
   ``Whole Execution Traces and Their Use in Debugging,'' accepted to appear in
   The Compiler Design Handbook: Optimizations and Machine Code Generation,
   Second Edition, Chapter 18, CRC Press, 20 pages.

6. Neelam Gupta and Rajiv Gupta,
   ``Data Flow Testing,''
   in The Compiler Design Handbook: Optimizations and Machine Code Generation,
   First Edition, Chapter 7, pages 247-267, CRC Press, September 2002.

   Peer Reviewed Conference Papers

7. Vijay Nagarajan, Dennis Jeffrey, Rajiv Gupta, and Neelam Gupta,
   ``ONTRAC: A System for Efficient ONline TRACing for Debugging,''
   21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2007),
   Paris, October 2007. Acceptance Rate: 21% (46/214)

8. Xiangyu Zhang, Sriraman Tallam, Neelam Gupta, and Rajiv Gupta,
   ``Towards Locating Execution Omission Errors,''
   ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2007),
   San Diego, June 2007. Acceptance Rate: 25% (45/178)

9. Neelam Gupta and Rajiv Gupta,
   ``ExPert: Dynamic Analysis based Fault Location via Execution Perturbations,''
   NSF Next Generation Software Workshop (NSFNGS), held in conjuction with IPDPS, March 2007.

10. Dennis Jeffrey and Neelam Gupta
    ``Test Case Prioritization Using Relevant Slices,''
    30th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2006),
    pages 411-418, Chicago, USA, September 18-21, 2006. Acceptance Rate: 31% (57/183).
    This paper won the Best Paper Award out of a total of 183 papers submitted to the conference.

11. Xiangyu Zhang, Neelam Gupta, and Rajiv Gupta,
    ``Pruning Dynamic Slices With Confidence,''
    ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2006),
    pages 169-180, Ottawa, Canada, June 2006. Acceptance Rate: 21.3% (36/169)

12. Xiangyu Zhang, Neelam Gupta, and Rajiv Gupta,
    ``Locating Faults Through Automated Predicate Switching,''
    International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2006),
    pages 272-281, Shanghai, China, May 2006. Acceptance Rate: 9% (36/395)

13. Neelam Gupta, Haifeng He, Xiangyu Zhang, and Rajiv Gupta,
    ``Locating Faulty Code Using Failure-Inducing Chops,''
    20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2005),
    pages 263-272, Long Beach, California, November 2005. Acceptance Rate: 9.9% (28/291)
    

14. Sriraman Tallam and Neelam Gupta,
    ``A Concept Analysis Inspired Greedy Algorithm for Test Suite Minimization,''
    ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and
    Engineering (PASTE 2005), co-located with Joint European Software Engineering Conference
    and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2005),
    pages 35-42, Lisbon, Portugal, September 5-6, 2005.
    

15. Dennis Jeffrey and Neelam Gupta,
    ``Test Suite Reduction with Selective Redundancy,''
    21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2005),
    pages 549-558, Budapest, Hungary, September 25-30, 2005. Acceptance Rate: 30.5% (55/180)

16. Xiangyu Zhang, Haifeng He, Neelam Gupta, and Rajiv Gupta,
    ``Experimental Evaluation of Using Dynamic Slices for Fault Location,''
    Sixth International Symposium on Automated and Analysis-Driven Debugging (AADEBUG 2005),
    pages 33-42, Monterey, California, September 19-21, 2005. Acceptance Rate: 36.7% (11/30)
    

17. Haifeng He and Neelam Gupta,
    ``Automated Debugging using Path-Based Weakest Preconditions,''
    Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE 2004), ETAPS Joint Conference 2004,
    pages 267-280, Barcelona, Spain, March 29-31, 2004. Acceptance Rate: 24.1% (22/91)
    

18. Neelam Gupta, YongJun Cho, and Mohammad Z. Hossain,
    ``Experiments with UNA for Solving Linear Constraints in Real Variables,''
    ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2004),
    pages 1013-1020, Nicosia, Cyprus, March 14-17, 2004. Acceptance Rate: 35.5% (280/787)
    

19. Neelam Gupta and Zachary V. Heidepriem,
    ``A New Structural Coverage Criteria for Dynamic Detection of Program Invariants,''
    18th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2003),
    pages 49-58, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, October 6-10, 2003. Acceptance Rate: 12.9% (22/170)

20. Neelam Gupta,
    ``Generating Test Data for Dynamically Discovering Likely Program Invariants,''
    ICSE 2003 Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (WODA 2003),
    co-located with International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2003),
    Portland, Oregon, USA, May 3-10, 2003.

21. Srinivas Visvanathan and Neelam Gupta,
    ``Generating Test Data for Functions with Pointer Inputs,''
    17th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2002),
    pages 149-160, Edinburgh, UK, September 2002. Acceptance Rate: 20.2% (19/94)

22. Neelam Gupta and Praveen Rao,
    ``Program Execution Based Module Cohesion Measurement,''
    16th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2001),
    pages 144-153, San Diego, USA, November 2001. Acceptance Rate: 19.5% (32/164)
    Nominated for Best Paper Award (5 papers were nominated for the award out of a
    total of 164 paper submissions).

23. Neelam Gupta
    ``A Hierarchy of Structural Coverage Criteria for Testing Multithreaded Programs,''
    International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications
    (PDPTA 2001), pages 1641-1646, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, June 2001.

24. Neelam Gupta, Aditya P. Mathur, and Mary Lou Soffa,
    ``Generating Test Data for Branch Coverage,''
    15th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2000),
    pages 219-227, Grenoble, France, September 2000. Acceptance Rate: 23% (23/100)

25. Neelam Gupta, Aditya P. Mathur, and Mary Lou Soffa,
    ``UNA Based Iterative Test Data Generation and its Evaluation,''
    14th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 1999),
    pages 224-232, Cocoa Beach, Florida, USA, October 1999. Acceptance Rate: 20.3% (25/123)

26. Neelam Gupta, Aditya P. Mathur, and Mary Lou Soffa,
    ``Automated Test Data Generation Using an Iterative Relaxation Method,''
    ACM SIGSOFT Sixth International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-6),
    pages 231-244, Orlando, Florida, USA, November 1998. Acceptance Rate: 19.8% (22/111)

    MS Thesis Supervised

27. Dennis Jeffrey, Test Suite Reduction with Selective Redundancy,
    Department of Computer Science, The University of Arizona, August 2005.

28. Haifeng He, Automated Debugging Using Path-Based Weakest Preconditions,
    Department of Computer Science, The University of Arizona, May 2004.