E-Mail: fabrizio.pastore@disco.unimib.it

Phone: +39 02 6448 7886

Room: T034

Memberships: IEEE, ACM, IEEE Computer Society, ACM Sigsoft

Personal web site: www.fabriziopastore.com

LTA Lab web site: www.lta.disco.unimib.it

I currently work with the Software Testing and Analysis laboratory of the University of Milano Bicocca as post-doc. I received the Ph.D degree at Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca on February 2010 defending the Thesis Automatic Diagnosis of Software Functional Faults by Means of Inferred Behavioral Models.

During 2010 i worked as post-doc at Università della Svizzera Italia with the Software Testing and Analysis Research group.

My research interests regard Software Engineering, in particular: Automatic fault diagnosis [SOQUA2007, ISSRE2008, ISSTA2009, ICSE2009, CAI2010, TSE2011], Test cases generation and maintenance [ICSM2010], and Design and maintenance of emerging software systems [ICAC2011, TOPI2011].

Automatic fault diagnosis

Most automatic and semi-automatic fault diagnosis techniques present two main limitations: they do not integrate data of different types and they do not scale well. My Ph.D Thesis [PHD2010] presents an automatic fault diagnosis approach that advances the state of the art by:

• defining a dynamic analysis technique that captures the data flow of the software [SOQUA2007, ISSRE2008]
• defining a technique that automatically filters false positives [ICSE2009, TSE2009];
• defining a technique that generates anomaly graphs, data structures that highlight the correlations among multiple anomalies thus simplifying fault diagnosis in presence of multiple faults [ICSE2009, TSE2009];
• defining a technique that automatically provides interpretations for anomalous event sequences [ISSTA2009];
• validating the defined techniques by applying them to diagnose real faults that affect industrial and open source systems [ISSTA2009, TSE2009];
• describing a framework for the integration of the techniques in a self-healing system [CAI2009].

I applied the dynamic analysis techniques defined during my Ph.D. on the industrial case studies of the SHADOWS project. SHADOWS is a EU STREP project that defined a framework for the development of self-healing systems.

The dynamic analysis techniques defined during my Ph.D. are part of the technical background of the UE Collaborative project PINCETTE. PINCETTE goal is the automatic validation and verification of software updates in embedded and networked software systems.

Automatic test cases generation

Software systems are modified and updated multiple times during their lifecycle. As a consequence software engineers must update the software test cases too: they need to define new test cases for the functionalities introduced, and maintain existing test cases broken by the changes. During my post-doc at Università della Svizzera Italiana I started a collaboration with Mehdi Mirzaaghaei  to define an approach that aims to support software developers in the activities related to test cases evolution, i.e. test cases maintenance and generation. The underlying hypothesis of this work is that test cases can be automatically generated or repaired by using test adaptation patterns. This research work aims to define a set of algorithms that capture and automate some of the activities commonly performed by software developers when they maintain test cases. A first result has been the definition of an approach for the automatic repair of test case compilation errors [ICSM2010].

Design and maintenance of emerging software systems

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm that is gathering a lot of attention from researchers and engineers. Cloud computing systems are based on the adoption of virtual resources (e.g. virtual machines or virtual networks) that are automatically started up and shut down to give the illusion of infinite resources while saving service costs.

I worked on the UE IP project RESERVOIR, whose goal has been the definition of a framework for the management of federated Cloud computing systems. Within RESERVOIR, I worked on the definition of an autonomic controller for the management of Cloud resources [ICAC2011].

I am currently working on the definition of a framework that aims to help software developers in the diagnosis of software faults in Cloud computing systems. The approach aims to automatically diagnose and suggest repair actions for software faults affecting Cloud system. The approach integrates well known static analysis techniques with the dynamic analysis techniques that I defined during my Ph.D. Thesis.

I am also working in collaboration with Farzad Habibipour Roudsari, a Ph.D. student at Università della Svizzera Italiana, on the definition of a methodology for Design for the Cloud. The goal of the methodology is to reduce the problem that emerge when software applications are developed to run on Cloud systems.

Another emerging architecture for the development of software systems are architectures based on plug-in middlewares. I recently worked on a solution for the definition of plug-in based systems that advance current design practices by enabling end-users to design plug-in compositions at runtime [TOPI2011]. The defined framework integrates capture and replay and workflow engines to augment the capabilities provided by the Eclipse middleware.

My research directions regard the definition of the framework for the automatic diagnosis of software faults in Cloud systems, the completion of the test evolution approach defined during his post-doc at Università della Svizzera Italiana,  and the empirical validation of the framework for pug-in composition.  

I am currently the developer and maintainer of the following tools:

• BCT - A Dynamic Analysis techniques targeted at fault diagnosis [http://www.lta.disco.unimib.it/tools/bct/]
• MASH - A framework that support end-user plug-in compositions [http://www.lta.disco.unimib.it/tools/mash]
• AVA - A library that generate interpretations for anomalous sequences of events [http://www.lta.disco.unimib.it/tools/ava/]
• KLFA - A log file analysis framework that identifies anomalies in log files [http://www.lta.disco.unimib.it/tools/klfa]

Ph.D. Thesis

[PHD2010] Fabrizio Pastore. Automatic Diagnosis of Software Functional Faults by Means of Inferred Behavioral Models. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Milano -Bicocca, http://hdl.handle.net/10281/7818, 2010.

International Journals

[TSE2011] Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore, Mauro Pezzè. Dynamic Analysis for Diagnosing Integration Faults. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (Impact Factor 3.75), 2011 (to appear).

[CAI2010] Alessandra Gorla, Mauro Pezzè, Jochen Wuttche, Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore. Achieving cost-effective software reliability through self-healing. Computing and Informatics. Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia. 2010.

Book Chapters

[CRC2011] Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore, Mauro Pezzè, Mauro Santoro. Mining Finite-State Automata with Annotations. Mining Software Specifications: Methodologies and Applications, CRC Press, 2011.

International Conferences and Workshops

[TOPI2011] L. Mariani and F. Pastore. Supporting Plug-in Mashes to Ease Tool Integration. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Developing Tools as Plug-ins (TOPI) - collocated with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2011.

[ICAC2011] A. Gambi, G. Toffetti, F. Pastore, M. Pezzè. A Kriging-based Controller for the Cloud. In ICAC'11: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Autonomic Computing (Demo paper), 2011 (to appear).

[ICSM2010] Mehdi Mirzaaghaei, Fabrizio Pastore, Mauro Pezzè.  Automatically Repairing Test Cases for Evolving Method Declarations. In ICSM'10: Proceedings of 26th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, ACM. Timisoara, Romania. 2010.

[ISSTA2009] Anton Babenko, Leonardo Mariani and Fabrizio Pastore. AVA: Automated Interpretation of Dynamically Detected Anomalies. In ISSTA'09: Proceedings of the 2009 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. ACM. Chicago, IL, USA. Pages 237-248. 2009.

[ICSE2009] Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore, Mauro Pezzè. A toolset for Automated Failure Analysis. In ICSE'09: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering – Volume 00. IEEE Computer Society. Vancouver, Canada. Pages  563-566. 2009.

[ISSRE2009] Leonardo Mariani, and Fabrizio Pastore. Automated Identification of Failure Causes in System Logs.  In ISSRE'08: Proceedings of the 2008 19th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering. IEEE Computer Society. Seattle, WA, USA . Pages 117-126. 2008.

[SOQUA2007] Domenico Cotroneo, Roberto Pietrantuono, Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore. Investigation of Failure Causes in Workload-Driven Reliability Testing.  In Fourth international Workshop on Software Quality Assurance: in Conjunction with the 6th ESEC/FSE Joint Meeting. SOQUA '07. ACM. Dubrovnik, Croatia. Pages 78-85. 2007.

Anida Zgura. Valutazione Empirica della Tecnica di Analisi Dinamica AVA. . Advisors: Dr. Leonardo Mariani, Dr. Fabrizio Pastore. Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca. July 2011. Bachelor Degree.
Ferrari Alessia. Analisi empirica di una tecnica per l’interpretazione dei fallimenti delle applicazioni orientate agli oggetti. Advisors: Dr. Leonardo Mariani, Dr. Fabrizio Pastore. Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca. March 2011. Bachelor degree.
Covelli Marco. Ottimizzazione di una tecnica per la prevenzione di problemi di concorrenza. Advisors: Dr. Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore. Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca. April 2010. Bachelor degree.
Alberto Goffi. Definizione di un’interfaccia grafica per la visualizzazione e l’analisi dei dati prodotti dalla tecnologia BCT. Advisors: Prof. Mauro Pezzè, Fabrizio Pastore. Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca. July 2009. Bachelor degree.
Andrea Mattavelli. Sviluppo di una tecnica di healing per problemi di concorrenza. Advisors: Dr. Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore. Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca. December 2009. Bachelor degree.
Anton Babenko. Diagnosi di difetti attraverso system logs. Advisors: Dr. Leonardo Mariani. Correlatore Dott. Fabrizio Pastore. Università degli studi di Milano - Bicocca. April 2009. Master degree.
Mirko Granata. Correzione automatizzata di difetti di regressione. Advisors: Dr. Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore. Università degli studi di Milano - Bicocca. April 2009. Master degree.
Valerio Terragni. Sviluppo di un ambiente visuale per il controllo della tecnica di analisi dinamica BCT. Advisors: Dr. Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore. Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca. October 2008. Bachelor degree.
Antonio Toscano. Sperimentazione di tecniche per il test di regressione in assenza di codice sorgente. Advisors: Dr. Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore. Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca. February 2008. Bachelor degree.
Francesco Columella. Progettazione e sviluppo di un framework per il controllo della tecnologia BCT. Advisors: Dr. Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore. Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca. December 2007. Bachelor degree.

Teaching assistant for the course “Laboratorio di Progettazione” (Design Lab). Department of Informatics Systems and Communication. Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca. A.Y. 2007/2008, 2008/2009, 2009/2010. Professor: Leonardo Mariani.

Teaching assistant for the course “Sistemi Operativi” (Operating Systems). Department of Informatics Systems and Communication. Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca. A.Y. 2008/2009. Professor: Luca Bernardinello, Hue Le Van.

Teaching assistant for the course “Laboratorio di Sistemi Operativi e Reti” (Operating Systems and Networks Laboratory). Department of Informatics Systems and Communication. Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca. A.Y. 2008/2009. Professor: Luca Bernardinello, Hue Le Van.

Tutoring activity for the lab “Laboratorio di Sistemi Operativi e Reti” (Operating systems and network laboratory). Department of Informatics Systems and Communication. Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca. A.Y. 2007/2008, 2008/2009. Professor: Leonardo Mariani.

Tutoring activity for the lab “Laboratorio di Informatica per la Fisica” (Informatics laboratory for Physics students). Department of Physics. Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca. A.Y. 2006/2007, 2007/2008, 2008/2009. Professor: Luca Bernardinello.