As automated testing and repair techniques that leverage bio-inspired algorithms mature and novel paradigms of computing increase, the line between machine and nature has blurred. We view programs as biological processes, use programs to reason about nature, and exploit living organisms to perform computations. These organic programs come in different forms but share some common characteristics. They may be configurable, rapidly evolve, lack complete specifications, and suffer some non-determinism. And as in all software, they have the potential for harboring faults, hence they should be tested for correctness. In this talk I will provide an overview of organic programs and highlight some of their common characteristics. I will then present some challenges we face when testing organic programs and show a few recent advances in testing and repairing them. Finally, I will discuss future directions of research.

Myra Cohen is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University, and the Lanh & Oanh Nguyen Endowed Chair of Software Engineering. Her research interests are in software testing of highly-configurable software, search based software engineering, applications of combinatorial designs, and synergies between systems and synthetic biology, and software engineering. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and was the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and has received 4 ACM distinguished paper awards. She an ACM Distinguished Scientist and serves on the steering committee of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE, the International Conference on Software Testing and the Systems and Software Product Line Conference and is active in other software engineering conference organizational roles. She was the program co-chair for ESEC/FSE 2020 and ICST 2019 and the general chair of Automated Software Engineering in 2015.