Paul Marinescu and Dr Cristian Cadar's patch testing tool KATCH received an ESEC/FSE 2013 Distinguished Artifact award in Saint Petersburg.

The 9th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2013) is an internationally renowned forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators who present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in the field of software engineering.

Paul and Cristian's presentation at the conference focused on a tool they and their team in the Software Reliability group have developed called KATCH. One of the distinguishing characteristics of software systems is that they evolve. New patches are committed to software repositories and new versions are released to users on a continuous basis. Unfortunately, many of these changes bring unexpected bugs that break the stability of the system or affect its security. KATCH addresses this problem by using a technique for automatic and comprehensive testing of code patches. It combines symbolic execution with several novel heuristics based on static and dynamic program analysis, and leverages existing test suites to quickly reach the new code. Their results show that KATCH can automatically synthesise inputs that significantly increase the patch coverage achieved by the existing manual test suites, and find bugs at the moment they are introduced. You can read more about their achievement  at  KATCH: High-Coverage Testing of Software Patches.

Well done Paul and Cristian on your prestigious award!