Orso, a member of the School of Computer Science's software engineering group, earned the award for his proposal, "BERT: BEhavioral Regression Testing." The project's goal is to notify developers immediately when they make a change to their software that may have unforeseen effects. To achieve this, the proposed technique thoroughly exercises the parts of the software that are directly or indirectly affected by a change and identifies new behaviors that are likely to be erroneous. Such behaviors are then reported to the developers, who can intervene before the potentially faulty code is released.

Orso is one of 12 researchers around the world--and just three in the United States--to receive the awards, which were selected from among 85 proposals. The dozen winners were presented their awards on May 5 during the 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering, held in Cape Town, South Africa.

For more information or to see a full list of the SEIF winners, visit the Microsoft Research website.