A few months ago, Paul Freet (VentureLab) reached out to me and asked if StarPound would be interested in being a beta tester for a new software testing platform (Tarantula) being developed by a team of researchers at Georgia Tech.  I forwarded the message on to our CTO, Wei Wang, who followed up with the team down there.  We are incredibly busy right now, and Wei didn’t think he would have enough spare time to dedicate to the task, despite the fact that we have wanted to bolster our QA processes for some time now.  I was a little disappointed (not at Wei, but at the situation), because I believe very strongly in QA, even in an agile environment.  Then, something wonderful happened.

The Tarantula team took the initiative, downloaded our open-source platform, and started running their own tests.  They are coming in next week (I think) to share their findings and get our feedback.  Kudos to the Tarantula team for thinking out of the box, and finding a way to get their product out there in the hands of users. There is most certainly a lesson there for other entrepreneurs – never take no for an answer – be creative – adapt, improvise, and overcome.  Be a real partner!

I am excited about the meeting, and I’ll post a followup here with the results of their findings.

If you aren’t familiar with Tarantula, here is a quick rundown:

Tarantula is a technique and tool for helping developers find bugs in source code.  The tool takes source coverage information from a set of test cases and produces a color-coded visual representation of the code. The color coding identifies areas of the code which are most likely to be buggy so that the developer may focus his/her attention in suspicious areas first.

For each statement in the source code, a suspiciousness and confidence value is computed. The suspiciousness is based on the relative numbers of passing and failing test cases that execute a statement. The confidence is based on the percentage of the total passing and failing test case sets that execute a statement. In the visualization, suspiciousness is represented by hue ranging from red to green; more suspicious statements appear more red and less suspicious statements appear more green. Confidence is represented by the brightness of the color; less confident statements appear dimmer and more confident statements appear brighter.

How does it work?

The Tarantula tool requires the source code, a set of test cases and per-test coverage information. While it has an independent data format that will support other tools in the future, the current implementation requires test cases written in JUnit and the use of Clover for coverage instrumentation. To use Tarantula, one instruments the source code with Clover and then runs a set of JUnit test cases. Assuming there are failing test cases to address, the data is imported from Clover reports into Tarantula. Then, the project is opened in Tarantula and the code is reviewed using the information it provides. The import functionality is available both as a wizard and a custom Ant task.

According to their FAQ, the original version worked only with code written in C, which makes it an prospective fit for Linux/UNIX system developers, embedded systems developers, etc.  StarPound is over one million lines of J2EE (not C), so it will be interesting to see how their approach and tools fare against a different code base.  Stay tuned!

Cheers.

The following is my account of the Wifi Cat ruse we pulled off last week at Startup Riot 2009 in Atlanta.  This is from memory, so the timeline may be a bit off here or there – but it will give you the gist.

Birth of a Kitten

Several weeks ago, I was down at the ATDC doing something or another – can’t remember exactly what.  Whenever I’m down there, I try and stop by and say hi to some of my fellow entrepreneurs located in Tech Square who are working hard getting their ventures off the ground.  Of course, I usually end up making the trip down the hall to visit with the rowdy crew over at Georgia Tech’s VentureLab (Stephen Fleming, Paul Freet, and Keith Mcgreggor).  On my drive down I had exchanged some text messages with Paul and we committed to hooking up for a quick lunch to get caught up, as I hadn’t seen him in a while.

At any rate, I walked in and Paul was giggling like a two year old in his office. He said something to the effect of “man, you’ve gotta see this.”  The rest is history.  I think.

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If you’ve ever been curious about what Stephen Fleming and his crew are tinkering around with down inside the bowels of Georgia Tech’s VentureLab, you won’t want to miss this. Through countless hours of toiling over database schema and Maker’s Mark, Stephen has rolled out a really cool new site that lays out all the various research and commercialization ventures that are bubbling up down at VentureLab. Click on the link called “current technology projects and companies” for the lowdown.

Good stuff …. and a great resource for investors, entrepreneurs, and researchers looking for more visibility into the innovations on the horizon here in Georgia.

Cheers.

It is good to see more of Atlanta’s venture professionals getting involved within the online community. The latest entrant is Stephen Fleming, chief poobah over at Georgia Tech’s Venturelab. Check out his new blog here.

And speaking of Stephen Fleming, congratulations on securing new investors for XCOR! If you missed our recent StartupLounge.com podcast with Stephen, check it out, as we talked quite a bit about XCOR.

Cheers.

In continuing with our torrid pace of podcasting, Mike Blake and I sat down and had a great discussion with Stephen Fleming of VentureLab. Enjoy the latest installment of our StartupLounge.com podcast. We also picked Stephen’s brain on the current early-stage/venture landscape here in Atlanta. We also did a deep dive into XCOR Aerospace (one of his portfolio companies) and the emerging commercial space flight industry.

As a bonus, we threw the service provider community “Under the Bus” (because they had it coming.) Also, you won’t want to miss the announcement of the first StartupLounge.com Capital Connections event!

I say “torrid” because it feels that way. We’re doing 2-3 shows a month now, and we’re finding that it is an enormous undertaking to put each show together. We have several meetings prior to each show, where we go over questions for the guest, show format, flow, future show lineups, etc. There are also several hours of post-production editing and mixing. The actual recording of the show is the smallest activity, in terms of actual time spent. So after just 8 shows, we’re right at 1,700 listeners now. Seeing that number climb with each show and reading your emails and comments is nice motivation to keep pushing us along.

A special thanks to Stephen for coming on the show and rolling up his sleeves to help entrepreneurs everywhere.

Cheers.