Project Partners

The project has the right combination of skills to deliver results - offering a balance of Universities, SMEs, and a key larger industrial enterprise. The university partners, and the site leads, bring expertise of testing, formal verification, language development, and refactoring (followed by aphabetical order):

• IT University of Göteborg -- Prof. John Hughes and Prof. Thomas Arts The IT University of Göteborg is a joint project between Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University. The work in the ProTest project will be carried out by our groups in Software Engineering & Management and Functional Programming. Both groups have tightly interacted before with a number of joined publications. The ITU has a long history of research in functional programming, going back more than twenty years. We contributed heavily to the design of Haskell, the most widely used lazy functional programming language, co-chairing the committee that designed the Haskell 98 standard. Our work in functional programming has focussed on language design, program analysis and transformation, and domain specific languages, implemented as libraries in a functional programming language. Among the domain specific languages we have developed are Lava, for describing and verifying hardware, and QuickCheck, for random property-based testing. Our work in software engineering has combined both technical aspects of software development as well as the social, managerial aspects. We are concentrated around three research themes, Software Quality, Software Architecture and Software Management. We use the research paradigm "Industry as Laboratory" and have extensive collaboration with industry to make that possible. Some key areas of research are testing, model driven development and agile software processes. We are strong too in model checking and automatic theorem proving, and have developed prize-winning provers for propositional and first-order logic. We have applied our testing and proving methods to distributed algorithms, finding serious bugs in a number of industrial software applications, among them a distributed leader election protocol - despite its origins in a proven-correct algorithm from the literature.


• University of Kent -- Prof. Simon Thompson. The functional programming group at the University of Kent has had a strong reputation for more than twenty years. Interest ranges from theory and semantics to the design of novel programming frameworks, and a recent focus of work has been refactoring for functional programming languages, first with the HaRe refactorer for Haskell, and more recently in building the Wrangler refactorer for Erlang. In both cases it has been our aim to build practical tools, covering the complete language and integrated with the standard program development tools, with industrial practitioners informing the user requirements of the systems.


• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid -- Prof. Lars-Åke Fredlund The work in the ProTest project will be conducted by members of the Babel and CLIP research groups located at the Facultad de Informática of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The Babel group has a strong background in programming and specification languages, and in formal methods related research. Examples include work on the design, semantics and an implementation of the Curry functional-logical programming language, and recently on the verification of Erlang programs using model checking techniques. The CLIP group also focuses on programming language research, and has produced the renowned Ciao Prolog Development System. One of the strengths of Ciao is precisely also a focus in the ProTest proposal: the focus on property-based development of programs. In Ciao properties are specified in the program code, and such properties are either proved correct at compile-time, using static-analysis techniques, or transformed into runtime assertions.


• University of Sheffield -- Prof. John Derrick (project coordinator). The Verification and Testing research group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield has interests that cover a wide range of topics in empirical software engineering, formal systems development, and software testing. The group has a long standing genuine interest in developing rigorous theories and integrating them into practical software development techniques and methods. They are the largest UK research group working on Testing, covering the field from theory, particularly model-based testing, through to practical testing in industry. They place a major emphasis on practical testing methods that are suitable for complex systems. They have made major advances on learning how to build effective test sets in an automated fashion, exploiting both formal techniques and evolutionary methods for searching complex test solution spaces.

Our industrial partners bring insights into what is required of practical tools, what properties will need to be checked, and ways of maximising industrial impact (followed by aphabetical order):

• Ericsson is a world-leading provider of telecommunications equipment and related services to mobile and fixed network operators globally. Over 1,000 networks in 140 countries utilize our network equipment and 40 percent of all mobile calls are made through our systems. We are one of the few companies worldwide that can offer end-to-end solutions for all major mobile communication standards.
  
  
• Erlang Solutions Ltd is the market leader in Erlang/OTP related consultancy services. They offer Erlang/OTP training at all levels, experienced Erlang contractors, consulting services, in-house systems development and 24/7 support of Erlang based systems. Their network of certified consultants is one of the most experienced as they have been using Erlang/OTP since its early days. With offices in the UK, Sweden, Poland and soon the US, and also with clients on five continents, they are available for short and long term opportunities world-wide.
  
  
• LambdaStream from Spain, enables the future of QuadPlay and Personal TV. Their cutting edge products, fully engineered and developped within the company, are addressed to the coming future, already a reality, of media delivery. We have solutions for Mobile TV, Intenet TV, IPTV & Cable, Broadcast TV and Virtual Billboard.
  
  
• Quviq AB develops and markets QuickCheck, a tool which generates test cases randomly from formal properties of the software under test. When a failing case is found, QuickCheck simplifies it systematically to a minimal failing example that often makes the cause of the problem self-evident. As well as the tool itself, Quviq offers training and support services to help customers get the maximum value from this new approach to testing. Quviq was founded in May 2006 by John Hughes and Thomas Arts, of Chalmers University and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and now serves customers in five countries and on two continents.