Bettering the Best: CITO Research Partnerships Program

Major Objectives

1. To identify, develop and adapt formal verification and test techniques to evolving best practices in E-Commerce  development.

2. To model and co-develop new cost-effective, comprehensive strategies and methods for certification, branding or granting logos for third party electronic commerce applications.

3. To investigate and further develop risk-based testing and verification metrics.

4. To adapt formal verification and test methods to assure the security of e-commerce systems at the requirements and design phases.

5. To incorporate multi-media concerns and challenges in each of the above.

Progress Towards Objectives

1. Collaboration among Probert, Qing Li, and Yiqun Xu (student of Williams) resulted in a new scenario language Simpl-T, for describing test cases as scenarios.  A paper on this language has been accepted for  4^th International SAM Workshop, June 1-4,  2004.   This may be one of the first semantic bridges between UML and a specific test language.  This work is part of the Master’s thesis by Qing Li which she will defend in mid-May, 2004.  Another of Probert’s students, Wei Xu, is developing a J2EE process (the standard for e-commerce development) which includes a translation tool from TTCN-3 (international standard testing language) to Java byte code to enable the use of HTTP-Unit, an open-source test tool for Web applications.  The related thesis should be submitted by the end of the summer.  Very recently, Ural and his students have developed a toolset to reduce the size of regression tests for state-based systems, and now is working with Chen and Probert to study related test generation and selection problems with respect to automation of some of the test process.
    
2. Objective 2 had to be deprecated due to transfer and replacement of an IBM co-worker.
    
3. Yanping Chen, an IBM CAS Doctoral Fellowship holder, and doctoral student of Probert and Ural, is continuing to make progress on identifying and developing new quality/cost metrics for the e-commerce test process, in ongoing meetings with IBM e-commerce test engineers and managers. A workshop/Paper is in preparation for CASCon 2004.  A related publication is:  R.L. Probert, Y.Chen, M. Cappa, P.Sims, B.Ghazizadeh, “Formal verification and validation for e-commerce: theory and best practices”, Journal of Information and Software Technology 45 (2003), 763-777.  Williams has obtained some new results on making configuration tests take into account risk-coverage requirements.
    
4. Peter Qi Qiu, a student of Probert’s, is extending the work by V Sawma, a previous IBM CAS scholar under Probert’s supervision, and has been the driving force behind the development of a prototype e-commerce system to make currency exchanges for U.S. dollars, called the EX system.  This system is developed as a system under test to aid in teaching and research into e-commerce testing.  Security issues are still under development. A related paper is: V. Sawma, R.L. Probert, "E-commerce authentication, an effective countermeasures design model", IEEE Int. Conf. on Electronic Information Security, Angers, France, 129-138, April, 2003.  Yiqun Xu is currently on a summer internship at the IBM Almaden laboratory (supervisor:  Savitha Srinivasan) in San Jose.  He is working on a security system for authorizing Eclipse plug-ins.  
    
5. Some substantial progress has been made in the development of User Interface and Usability tests for web applications in general under the leadership of Dr. El-Saddik.  Students Majdi Rawashdeh and Jianming Ke developed a metadata tagging system that supports internationalization. One of our major progress points is our paper “A Framework for Distributed Multimedia Content Adaptation” to be presented at the IEEE/ACM QShine'2004, Oct 18-20, 2004 Dallas, TX. This present an infrastructure for trans-coding multimedia streams. The infrastructure takes into consideration the profile of communicating devices, network connectivity, exchanged content format, context description, and available adaptation services to find a chain of adaptation services that could be applied to the content. Part of the infrastructure is a selection algorithm that finds the best sequence of adaptation services that can maximize the user’s satisfaction with the delivered content. Majdi is at the moment focusing on the localization of on-line content for handling cultural diversities that exist. Jinaming is now concentrating on developing parameters to measure web services efficiency, loads, etc. 

Students Involved:
Qing Li (MCS)
Yiqun Xu (Ph.D)
Wei Xu (MCS)
Yanping Chen (MCS)
Peter Qi Qiu (MCS)
Victor Swama (MCS, 2003)
Majdi Rawashdeh (MCS)
Jianming Ke (MCS)

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