Sara Sprenkle

I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Washington & Lee University. I take pride in using innovative educational techniques in the introductory computer science courses and advanced software development courses. I also enjoy working with motivated undergraduates on research problems with concrete outcomes.

Education

I completed my Ph.D. in Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Delaware in August 2007. I was a 2000 NSF Graduate Research Fellow.

I graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from Gettysburg College and with a master's degree in computer science from Duke University.

Teaching

Fall 2009: CS209: Software Development
Spring 2009: CS297: Tools for the Software Life Cycle and Beyond
Winter 2009: CS111: Fundamentals of Programming I
CS211: Algorithm Analysis
Fall 2008: CS209: Software Development
CS397: Human-Computer Interaction
Spring 2008: CS297: Web Applications
Winter 2008: CS111: Fundamentals of Programming I

My Teaching Philosophy and All Courses

Resources

Curriculum Vitae
Bibtex2HTML: my updates
HTML & CSS Help for students starting to create web pages without the help of a tool such as DreamWeaver or FrontPage.

Research

My research interests are in software testing and distributed systems, specializing in automated testing techniques for web applications. I often collaborate with Lori Pollock's Software Analysis and Compilation Lab. See my research page for more information about my work and projects you can get involved with.

<a href="papers/">Papers</a> <UL> <li>Sara Sprenkle, Lori Pollock, Holly Esquivel, Barbara Hazelwood, and Stacey Ecott. "Automated Oracle Comparators for Testing Web Applications." 18th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, IEEE, November 2007. <li>Sreedevi Sampath, Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Lori Pollock, and Amie Souter Greenwald. "Applying Concept Analysis to User-session-based Testing of Web Applications." Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 33, No. 10, pp. 643--658. IEEE. October 2007. <li>Sara Sprenkle, Emily Hill, and Lori Pollock. "Learning Effective Oracle Comparator Combinations for Web Applications." First International Workshop on Software Test Evaluation (STEV 2007), IEEE, October 2007. <li>Sreedevi Sampath, Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, and Lori Pollock. "Web Application Testing with Customized Test Requirements--An Experimental Comparison Study." International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, November 2006. <li>Sreedevi Sampath, Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, and Lori Pollock. "Integrating Customized Test Requirements with Traditional Requirements in Web Application Testing." Workshop on Testing, Analysis and Verification of Web Services and Applications, ACM, pp. 23--32. July 2006. <li>Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Sreedevi Sampath, and Lori Pollock. "A Case Study of Automatically Creating Test Suites from Web Application Field Data." Workshop on Testing, Analysis and Verification of Web Services and Applications (TAV-WEB 2006), ACM, July 2006. <LI> "Automated Replay and Fault Detection for Web Applications," Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Sreedevi Sampath, and Lori Pollock. To appear at the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), November 2005. <LI>"An Empirical Comparison of Test Suite Reduction Techniques for User-session-based Testing of Web Applications." Sara Sprenkle, Sreedevi Sampath, Emily Gibson, Lori Pollock, and Amie Souter. International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM05), IEEE, September 2005. (<a href="http://www.cis.udel.edu/~hiper/papers/sprenkleICSM05.pdf">pdf</a>) <LI>"Analyzing Clusters of Web Application User Sessions," Sreedevi Sampath, Sara Sprenkle, Emily Gibson, Lori Pollock, and Amie Souter, Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (WODA), co-located with International Conference on Software Engineering, May 2005. (<a href="http://www.cis.udel.edu/~hiper/papers/sampath.woda05.pdf">pdf</a>) <LI>"Exploring Availability and Usage Guarantees in Resource Allocation Through Leases", master's project (<a href="papers/ses_masters.pdf">pdf</a>). <LI>"Exploiting Templates to Scale Consistency Maintenance in Edge Database Caches," Khalil Amiri, Sara Sprenkle, Renu Tewari and Sriram Padmanabhan, in proceedings of the International Workshop on Web Caching and Content Distribution, Sep-Oct, 2003. <a href="papers/consistency-template-filtering.pdf">(pdf)</a> <LI>"Dynamic Virtual Clusters in a Grid Site Manager," Jeffrey S. Chase, David E. Irwin, Laura E. Grit, Justin D. Moore, and Sara Sprenkle, in proceedings of the International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, <a href="http://www.hpdc.org/">HPDC 2003</a>, June 2003. <a href="http://issg.cs.duke.edu/publications/cod-grid.pdf">(pdf)</a> <LI>Coven: Brewing Better Collaboration through Software Configuration Management, Mark C. Chu-Carroll and Sara Sprenkle, in proceedings of <a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/fse8/">FSE 2000</a>, November 2000. <a href="papers/coven_fse00.pdf">(pdf)</a> <LI>Software Configuration Management as a Mechanism for Multidimensional Separation of Concerns, Mark C. Chu-Carroll and Sara Sprenkle <a href="papers/mdsc_mcc_ses.pdf">(pdf)</a> </UL>

Undergraduate Research Projects

I enjoy working with motivated undergraduates on real research problems with concrete outcomes. Some examples of past undergraduate research projects include

Comparing data models for automatically generating test cases for web applications (poster, abstract)
Developing automated oracle comparators for web applications (led to an ISSRE publication)
Developing WebVizOr, a tool for viewing the HTML results from executing test cases (led to a TAIC-PART publication)
Developing tools for logging user accesses to Web applications, creating user sessions from the logged accesses, and automatically replaying the generated user sessions and other test cases (used in several publications).
Customizing an online digital library, which was later used as a subject application in later testing research (included in several publications)
Mutating Web application code to enable failure detection experiments (led to a GHC poster)

Service

Program Committee Member, International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, 2008, 2009
Program Committee Member, TAIC PART, 2009
Technical Program Reviewer, Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing, 2009
Poster Committee, International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 2009
Scholarship Reviewer, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, 2008, 2009

Useful Information

I'm building up a Wiki with lots of useful information for W&L students and others.

Student Groups

The following links are for the University of Delaware, but they contain information and links that are useful to students at other schools as well.

UD CISters - for women in computer science and related fields at the University of Delaware
UD CIS GSA - for University of Delaware graduate students in computer and information sciences

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