Beijing University of Aeronautics and AstronauticsWebsite:Email: |
Kai-Yuan Cai is a Cheung Kong Scholar (Chair Professor), jointly appointed by the Ministry of Education of China and the Li Ka Shing Foundation of Hong Kong in 1999. He has been a full professor at Beihang University (Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) since 1995. He was born in April 1965 and entered Beihang University as an undergraduate student in 1980. He received his B.S. degree in 1984, M.S. degree in 1987, and Ph.D. degree in 1991, all from Beihang University. He was a research fellow at the Centre for Software Reliability, City University, London, a visiting scholar at Purdue University (USA), and visiting professorial fellow at University of Wallongong (Australia).
Dr. Cai has published numerous research papers. He is the author of three books: Software Defect and Operational Profile Modeling (Kluwer, Boston, 1998); Introduction to Fuzzy Reliability (Kluwer, Boston, 1996); Elements of Software Reliability Engineering (Tsinghua University Press, Beijing, 1995, in Chinese). He serves on the editorial board of the international journal Fuzzy Sets and Systems and was the editor of the Kluwer International Series on Asian Studies in Computer and Information Science. He served as program committee co-chair for the Fifth International Conference on Quality Software, the First International Workshop on Software Cybernetics and General co-chair for The Second International Symposium on Service-Oriented System Engineering. He also served as guest editor for Fuzzy Sets and Systems (1996), the International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (2006), the Journal of Systems and Software (2006), and IEEE Transactions on Reliability (2010). His main research interests include software reliability and testing, reliable flight control, and software cybernetics.
Adaptive testing is the adaptive control counterpart in software testing. In this talk we show how software testing can be treated as an adaptive control problem and how adaptive control principles can be employed to synthesize software testing strategies. Case studies demonstrate that the resulting adaptive testing strategies can noticeably outperform conventional testing strategies in the sense that more software defects can be detected or more accurate estimates of software reliability can be obtained.
The effectiveness of adaptive testing strategies supports the idea of software cybernetics that explores the interplay between software and control. In general, software cybernetics (a) Formalize and quantify feedback mechanisms in software processes and systems; (b) Adapt control theory principles to software processes and systems; (c) Apply the principles of software theories and engineering to control systems and processes; and (d) Integrate the theories of software engineering and control engineering. Since feedback is ubiquitous in software processes and systems, it is reasonable to argue that software engineering can serve as a new application domain of control technology.