Tech Talk: A Taste of DDT

The June 9th Galois Tech Talk will be delivered by Jim Grundy titled “A Taste of DDT.”

  • Date: Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
  • Time: 10:30am – 12:00 noon
  • Location: Galois, Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300(3rd floor of the Commonwealth Building)Portland, OR 97204

Abstract: DDT is a partial implementation of the directed testing approach to test generation. The presentation will likely interest you if you are interested in how directed testing works, or what it is like to use in practice.This seminar presents a rational reconstruction of an experience of using DDT to test a rather rich FIFO/list module implemented in C. The module in question is about 1500 lines of code with a dozen or so entry points. The presentation walks through the user experience of writing and running a first naïve test harness for the module, finding and correcting issues in the code, up to a final declaration of victory.The presentation is rather long, about 1.5 hours, but takes the form of a gently paced walk through a user experience, and as such is rather less taxing on the concentration that you might expect for a talk of its duration.Bio: Jim Grundy is a research scientist with Intel Corporation.  His interests include functional programming, mechanized and interactive reasoning and their application to establishing the correctness of hardware and software systems.


Galois has been holding weekly technical seminars for several years on topics from functional programming, formal methods, compiler and language design, to cryptography, and operating system construction, with talks by many figures from the programming language and formal methods communities. The talks are open and free. An RSVP is not required, but feel free to contact the organizer with questions and comments.