CSC 509 Assignment 1 -- A Paper of Interest

Revised 7 April

Paper Idea: 2PM Monday 7 April, to be discussed in class
Brief Paper Summary: 11:59PM Thursday 10 April
Presentation Slides: 2PM Monday 14 April
Presentations: in class Monday and Wednesday of Week 3

The paper summary and presentation slides will be submitted via wiki post.
Wiki details will be covered on Monday of Week 2.

Assignment Overview

This is a "jump in the deep end" style of assignment. Your task is to find one paper in the software testing research literature that looks interesting to you, read the paper, and present a 10-minute summary of it's most interesting results. The idea of "looks interesting" is that you are beginning to formulate your area of interest for the class project, as discussed in the class syllabus.

Specific Tasks

1. Starting with the literature sources given in the syllabus, do a search for "software testing".

2. Look elsewhere in the scholarly literature, in particular at the sources listed in the syllabus, with other search phrases depending on your interests.

3. Find one to a few papers in your area of interest, with the following general characteristics:

   1. they're sufficiently accessible that you can understand most of what's going on

   2. the paper presents some cool idea in your area of software testing interest, at least an idea that you think is pretty cool

   3. alternative to the cool idea idea, you can choose a paper that is a seminal piece of work in a particular area, e.g., a paper that invented a particular concept, that has tons of people who reference it

4. Discuss your paper selection with the class on Monday 7 April, including whether you think it's in an area where you'd like to so your class project.

5. Prepare a one to three paragraph summary of the paper for other people to read in advance of the paper presentation you'll make in the third week of class. The summary describes what's interesting about the paper, it's major result, or otherwise what makes it worthwhile.

6. Prepare a 10-minute presentation on the paper to be presented during the third week of the class.

The alotted time for the presentation is 10 minutes. Plan the presentation itself to be about 5 minutes, with 5 minutes alloted for questions. If there no questions from the audience to fill in the second half of the 10-minute time slot, have some questions of your own about the paper that you can use to "seed" further discussion. I.e., these are questions that you think would be reasonable to have about the subject matter of the paper if you had heard the first 5 minutes of the talk and read the paper summary that you provided.

PS -- don't reveal your "hidden" questions in the paper summary you post for others to read. Hopefully your presentation will prompt some questions from audience members. Only if they're aren't enough questions to fill a 5-minute discussion period will you break out yours.