Facebook: Automated test case design at Facebook

Talk overview: This talk will describe work at Facebook on using Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search-based_software_engineering) techniques to automatically design test cases for large scale tech sector mobile apps. There will be plenty of time allowed for questions. If students are interested, in the Q&A session we could, for example, talk about what it's like to work for a large tech sector company like Facebook, how to get a software engineering start-up off the ground and how to make it an attractive acquisition target and/or about open research and scientific challenges for software engineering at scale. The talk is aimed at students (undergraduate through PhD level), but staff are very welcome to attend and ask questions too. The talk touches on research impact and there will be a chance to discuss start-ups and spin outs from research, which might be interesting for some faculty.

Biography: Mark Harman is an engineering manager at Facebook London, where he manages a team, working on Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) at Facebook Scale. He is also a part time professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where he directed the CREST centre for ten years (2006-2017) and was Head of Software Systems Engineering (2012-2017). He is known for work on source code analysis, software testing, app store analysis and empirical software engineering. He was the co-founder of the field SBSE, which has grown rapidly with over 1,700 scientific publications from authors spread over more than 40 countries. SBSE research and practice is now the primary focus of his current work in both the industrial and scientific communities. In addition to Facebook itself, Mark's SBSE scientific work is also supported by the ERC and EPSRC funding councils, and his teams at Facebook and at UCL are both now hiring. The Facebook team is looking for practical software engineers and the UCL team is looking for PhD students to work on research in automatically testing and fixing software.