WASP offers new insights – and possibilities
System Verification’s Adha Hrusto currently spends most of her time in her office at Lund University. She is working within the Autonomous Systems track of the WASP program. But how did she end up here, and how can System Verification and our clients benefit from her participation in the program?
But let’s start from the beginning. As you’ve probably already guessed, WASP does not refer to the sugar-loving insect or to the extravagant heavy metal band from the 80’s. No, this WASP is Sweden’s largest individual research program – The Wallenberg Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Systems and Software Program. To quote the wasp-sweden.org website, WASP is described as “a major national initiative for strategically motivated basic research, education and faculty recruitment in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and software development”.
Adha Hrusto’s journey into the program started with an annual performance and development review. At the time, she had been with System Verification in Bosnia for about two years, working as a test automation engineer.
“My manager asked me where I see myself in 5 years. I answered that I would like to pursue my career in research, but at the same time continue working for the company. At the time, we were talking a lot about AI in software testing. As the company strive to be the best provider of QA services and I have a good educational background (note: a master’s degree from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Sarajevo), I thought that it would be great if I could both explore the possibilities in this field and help the company on its journey,” says Adha.
Via System Verification’s Magnus C Ohlsson, who holds a PhD degree and has been involved in research projects before, Adha got in touch with Lund university. And as WASP announced open industrial PhD positions, Adha and Magnus initiated a project proposal – which was accepted.
“I am now part of the Autonomous Systems (AS) track and attend courses, conferences and summer schools together with colleagues from other Swedish universities. It is a great opportunity, but also a huge responsibility that offers many possibilities – for me personally, and also when it comes to services that we provide to our customers. There are many applications of machine learning that may improve test automation frameworks, ease test selection and prioritization, or speed up the feedback from production environments by proper analysis of operations data,” explains Adha.
Her project is about continuous system testing and monitoring of System of Systems – SoS – during the operational execution.
The background is that for complex systems composed of multiple layers of systems, the consequences of a software update are always hard to foresee. Furthermore, with continuous deployment of new releases, the time devoted to spend on system testing tends to be reduced. Erroneous software – be it by coding, design or specification error – is thus at higher risk of slipping into operations. To mitigate this risk, system of systems can be continuously monitored, as a kind of continuous system testing.
Adha Hrusto, Test Automation Engineer
The real-life case the project uses is a ticketing system. The project aims to improve system operations and development by continuous monitoring and learning from run-time alerts. The main objectives are to identify sequences, clusters and absence of alerts that may provide information about system health, and to develop technology for predicting failures and analysing alerts inspired by machine learning.
Colleagues are welcome to take part of Adha’s learnings. Presentations and insights from her research are regularly published on System Verification’s internal channels.
“Right now, I am available 20% for internal projects. I will gradually have more and more time for company projects and after PhD completion, I will return to working fulltime for System Verification,” concludes Adha.
Adha’s cutting-edge expertise will be even more accessible to our customers in the future – but note that it is available already today. If you have project plans that involve machine learning, or if you are curious about what it can do for your business: don’t hesitate to get in touch!
