About SCOPE Labs

SCOPE Lab works on techniques for showing correctness of all program executions. We aims to develop foundational technologies for improving the reliability of software systems.

A core theme of our research is to reduce the effort needed by developers to ensure their software system works correctly. To reduce the “effort” we focus on building automated verification, debugging and synthesis techniques for the software implementation (code) and the software design (model). You can see an overview of our research work here.

We are part of the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) within the Computer Science and Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA).

(Yes, our icon is Allison’s smiling cat because…. why not?)

Research Topics

• Automated Software Engineering: Test/Oracle Generation, Automated Bug Localization and Repair, Regression Testing, and Mutation Testing
• Formal Methods and Programming Languages: Model Based Testing, First-Order Logic, Program Synthesis, Model Checking and Symbolic Execution

News.

• April 2024: Congratulations Ana on passing her PhD Proposal!
• March 2024: Congratulations Augustus on his pre-print of AlloyASG: Alloy Predicate Code Representation as a Compact Structurally Balanced Graph.
• Feburary 2024: Congratulations Ana on her pre-print of Empirically Exploring How Novices Write Software Models in Alloy.
• Janurary 2024: One paper “ LLM4TDD: Best Practices for Test Driven Development Using Large Language Models” accepted into LLMCODE@ICSE 2024. Congratulations Sanyogita!
• December 2023: Congratulations Allison on receiving a NSF CAREER Award grant to work on integrating live programming practices into finite model finders with the aim to ease the burden of learning software modeling. Total: 525k
• December 2023: Congratulations Sanyogita on her pre-print of LLM4TDD: Best Practices for Test Driven Development Using Large Language Models.
• November 2023: Congratulations Augustus on his pre-print of Structural Balance of Complex Weighted Graphs and Multi-partite Consensus.
• November 2023: Congratulations Augustus on passing his diagnostic exam!
• July 2023: One paper “Crucible: Graphical Test Cases for Alloy Models” accepted into ISSRE 2023. Congratulations Adam!
• July 2023: One paper “Live Programming for Finite Model Finders” accepted into ASE NIER 2023.
• June 2023: Two papers accepted into MODELS 2023. Congratulations Ana!
• April 2023: Congratulations Anahita on passing her comprehensive exam! She is officially a PhD candidate at UTA.
• January 2023: Congratulations Allison on the arrivial of baby Arcadia!
• December 2022: Congratulations Ana on passing her comprehensive exam! She is officially a PhD candidate at UTA.
• November 2022: One paper “Abstract Alloy Instances” accepted into FM 2023.
• September 2022: Our recent NSF grant is being talked about in the media.
• July 2022: One paper “REACH: Refining Alloy Scenarios by Size” accepted into ISSRE 2022. Congratulations Ana!
• July 2022: We have received a NSF CISE Core grant to work on incremental analysis of software models across their development, testing and synthesis.
• April 2022: Congratulations Anahita and Ana on passing your diagnostic exams!
• March 2022: One paper “Towards Automated Input Generation for Sketching Alloy Models” accepted into FormaliSE 2022. Congratulations Ana!
• Feburary 2022: Congratulations Anahita on getting her master’s thesis work written up in Wired.
• Feburary 2022: Hosted a workshop on z3 at OurCS@DFW.
• Decemeber 2021: Resha presented her work on current limtiations of automated repair tools at UTA’s UROP Fall semester wrap up.
• October 2021: Presented our solution enumeration tool Hawkeye at ISSRE2021.
• July 2021: One paper accepted into ISSRE 2021!
• June 2021: One paper accepted into FSE Demo 2021. Congratulations Tanvir!
• June 2021: Allison recieved a NSF FmitF award to investigate improvements to Alloy’s scenario finding functionality.
• More: (Older News).