David Coppit

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

The College of William and Mary

Contact Information

Research Interests

• Aspect-oriented software development, software verification, applied formal methods, component-based software development

Professional Education

• Ph.D. Computer Science. The University of Virginia, January 2003.
• M.S. Computer Science. The University of Virginia, June 1998.
• B.S. Computer Science. The University of Mississippi, June 1995.
• B.S. Physics. The University of Mississippi, June 1995. Graduated magna cum laude with minors in Economics and Mathematics.

Positions

• Winter 2003 to present. Assistant Professor of Computer Science, The College of William and Mary.
• Fall 2002 to Winter 2003. Lecturer in Computer Science, The College of William and Mary.
• Summer 1998. Intern at Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories.
• Fall 1996 to Spring 2002. Research Assistant for Kevin J. Sullivan (graduate student). Department of Computer Science, The University of Virginia.
• Fall 1995 to Spring 1996. Teaching Assistant. Department of Computer Science, The University of Virginia.

Courses Taught

• CSci 780: Advanced Software Engineering, Fall 2003-2004, 2006.
• CSci 420/520: Software Development with Formal Methods, Fall 2005.
• CSci 435/535: Software Engineering. Spring 2003-2006.
• CSci 243: Discrete Structures. Fall 2002.

Research Publications

My name is in bold. Student names are in bold italics.

Papers in Progress

• David Coppit, Robert Painter, and Meghan Revelle. Software Plans: A Multidimensional Approach for Fine-Grained Tangling of Concerns in Code. Submitted to ICSE.
• Meghan Revelle and David Coppit. Reverse Engineering Software Plans Using Formal Concept Analysis. Submitted to AOSD.
• David Coppit and Meghan Revelle. The Intersect/Settle Algorithm for Formal Concept Analysis.
• John A. Murphy and David Coppit. Random generation of test data for complex input spaces.
• Justin G. Manweiler and David Coppit. Unbiased Random Generation of Structured Test Data.
• David Coppit, Kevin J. Sullivan, Joanne Bechta Dugan, and Yong Ou. A formally-based algorithm for solving dynamic fault trees. Completed, but held since October 2003 by The University of Virginia pending the resolution of intellectual property issues.

Refereed Journals

• David Coppit. Implementing Large Projects in Software Engineering Courses. Computer Science Education, 16(1):53-73, March 2006.
• David Coppit, Jinlin Yang, Sarfraz Khurshid, Wei Le, and Kevin Sullivan. Software assurance by bounded exhaustive testing. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 31(4):328-39, April 2005.
• Joanne Bechta Dugan, Kevin J. Sullivan, and David Coppit. Developing a low-cost high-quality software tool for dynamic fault tree analysis. Transactions on Reliability, March 2000, pages 49-59. IEEE.

Refereed Conferences

• David Coppit, Robert Painter, and Meghan Revelle. Spotlight: A Prototype Tool for Software Plans. In Proceedings of 2007 the International Conference on Software Engineering, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 20-26 May 2007. IEEE. Referreed formal research demonstration paper, to appear. (21% acceptance rate)
• David Coppit and Jeixin Lian. yagg: An Easy-To-Use Generator for Structured Test Inputs. In 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pages 356-359, Long Beach, California, 7-11 November 2005. (22% acceptance rate)
• David Coppit and Jennifer M. Haddox-Schatz. Large team projects in software engineering courses. In Proceedings of the 36th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pages 137-141, St. Louis, Missouri, 23-27 February 2005. (32% acceptance rate)
• David Coppit, Robert R. Painter. High-level reliability languages using a general intermediate domain. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, Alexandria, Virginia, 24-27 January 2005. IEEE. (57% acceptance rate)
• Kevin Sullivan, Jinlin Yang, David Coppit, Sarfraz Khurshid, and Daniel Jackson. Software assurance by bounded exhaustive testing. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. Boston, Massachusetts, 11-14 July 2004. (28% acceptance rate)
• David Coppit, Robert R. Painter, and Kevin J. Sullivan. Shared semantic domains for computational reliability engineering. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, pages 168-180, Denver, Colorado, 17-20 November 2003. IEEE. (21% acceptance rate)
• David Coppit and Kevin J. Sullivan. Sound methods and effective tools for engineering modeling and analysis. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 198-207, Portland, Oregon, 3-10 May 2003. IEEE. (13% acceptance rate)
• David Coppit, Kevin J. Sullivan, and Joanne Bechta Dugan. Formal semantics of models for computational engineering: a case study on dynamic fault trees. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, pages 270-282, San Jose, California, 8-11 October 2000. IEEE.
• David Coppit and Kevin J. Sullivan. Multiple mass-market applications as components. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 273-82, Limerick, Ireland, 4-11 June 2000. IEEE. (14% acceptance rate)
• David Coppit and Kevin J. Sullivan. Galileo: A tool built from mass-market applications. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 750-3, Limerick, Ireland, 4-11 June 2000. IEEE. Referreed formal research demonstration paper.
• Joanne Bechta Dugan, Kevin J. Sullivan, and David Coppit. Developing a high-quality software tool for fault tree analysis. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, pages 222-31, Boca Raton, Florida, 1-4 November 1999. IEEE.
• Kevin J. Sullivan, David Coppit, and Joanne Bechta Dugan. The Galileo fault tree analysis tool. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing, pages 232-5, Madison, Wisconsin, 15-18 June 1999. IEEE.
• David Coppit and Kevin J. Sullivan. Formal specification in collaborative design of critical software tools. In Proceedings Third IEEE International High-Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium, pages 13-20, Washington, D.C., 13-14 November 1998. IEEE.
• Ragavan Manian, Joanne Bechta Dugan, David Coppit, and Kevin Sullivan. Combining various solution techniques for dynamic fault tree analysis of computer systems. In Proceedings Third IEEE International High-Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium, pages 21-28, Washington, D.C., 13-14 November 1998. IEEE.
• Ragavan Manian, David Coppit, Kevin Sullivan, and Joanne Bechta Dugan. Bridging the gap between systems and dynamic fault tree models. In Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium 1999 Proceedings, pages 105-11, Washington, D.C., 18-21 January 1999. IEEE.
• Kevin J. Sullivan, Jake Cockrell, Shengtong Zhang and David Coppit, Package-oriented programming of engineering tools. In Proceedings of 1997 the International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 616-7, Boston, Massachusetts, 17-23 May 1997. IEEE. Referreed formal research demonstration paper.

Refereed Workshops

• Robert R. Painter and David Coppit. A Model for Software Plans. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on the Modeling and Analysis of Concerns in Software, pages 14-18, St. Louis, Missouri, 16 May 2005. (One of three papers selected for extended presentation.)
• Meghan Revelle, Tiffany Broadbent, and David Coppit. Understanding Concerns in Software: Insights Gained from Two Case Studies. In Proceedings of 13th IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension, pages 23-32, St. Louis, Missouri, 15-16 May 2005. (44% acceptance rate)
• David Coppit and Jennifer Haddox-Schatz. On the use of specification-based assertions as test oracles. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual IEEE/NASA Software Engineering Workshop. Greenbelt, Maryland, 6-7 April 2005. (~33% acceptance rate)
• David Coppit and Benjamin Cox. Software plans for separation of concerns. In Proceedings of the Third AOSD Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software, Lancaster, UK, 22 March 2004. IEEE. (55% acceptance rate)

Unrefereed Publications

• David Coppit. yagg: Implementation and Evaluation. Technical Report WM-CS-2005-13, Department of Computer Science, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, November 2005.
• David Coppit. Practical Techniques for Automated Specification-Based Testing. Invited paper to the Virginia Summit on Secure and Dependable Computing Systems, April 20-21 2005.
• David Coppit. Engineering modeling and analysis: Sound methods and effective tools. Ph.D. dissertation. Jan 2003.
• David Coppit and Kevin J. Sullivan. Unwrapping. Technical Report CS-97-17, Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia, July 1997.

Research Presentations

Invited Talks

• David Coppit. Using Software Plans to Separate Tangled Features in Code, University of Delaware, March 15 2006.
• David Coppit. Software Plans: A New Approach for Separating Tangled Concerns. National Institute of Aerospace, May 13 2005.
• David Coppit. Practical Techniques for Automated Specification-Based Testing. Virginia Summit on Secure and Dependable Computing Systems, April 20-21 2005.
• David Coppit. "Software Plans: Achieving Fine-Grained Separation of Concerns," Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, Illinois, March 2005.
• David Coppit. "Exhaustive Testing Revisited: A New Look at an Old Idea," The University of Chicago Department of Computer Science, Chicago, Illinois, March 2005.
• David Coppit. "Research Overview". Presentation given to Cigital Research to explore potential collaborations, 2 June 2004.

Conferences (Presentations for Full Papers)

• David Coppit and Jennifer M. Haddox-Schatz. "Large team projects in software engineering courses," 36th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, St. Louis, Missouri, February 2005.
• David Coppit and Robert R. Painter. "High-level reliability languages using a general intermediate domain," 51st Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, Alexandria, Virginia, January 2005.
• David Coppit and Robert R. Painter. "Shared semantic domains for computational reliability engineering," 14th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, Denver, Colorado, November 2003.
• David Coppit and Kevin J. Sullivan. "Sound methods and effective tools for engineering modeling and analysis," 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, Portland, Oregon, May 2003.
• David Coppit, Kevin J. Sullivan, and Joanne Bechta Dugan. "Formal semantics of models for computational engineering: a case study on dynamic fault trees," 11th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, San Jose, California, October 2000.
• David Coppit and Kevin J. Sullivan. "Multiple mass-market applications as components," 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, June 2000.
• David Coppit and Kevin J. Sullivan. "Formal specification in collaborative design of critical software tools," The High Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium, Bethesda, Maryland, 13 November 1998.

Conferences (Formal Research Demonstrations)

• David Coppit and Kevin J. Sullivan. "Galileo: A tool built from mass-market applications," 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, June 2000.
• Kevin J. Sullivan, Jake Cockrell, Shengtong Zhang and David Coppit. "Package-oriented programming of engineering tools," 19th International Conference on Software Engineering, Boston, Massachusetts, May 1997.

Workshops and Tutorials

• Robert R. Painter and David Coppit, "A Model for Software Plans," In the First International Workshop on the Modeling and Analysis of Concerns in Software, St. Louis, Missouri, 16 May 2005. (One of three papers selected for extended presentation.).
• Meghan Revelle, Tiffany Broadbent, and David Coppit, "Understanding Concerns in Software: Insights Gained from Two Case Studies," In the 13th IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension, St. Louis, Missouri, 15 May 2005.
• David Coppit and Jennifer M. Haddox-Schatz, "On the use of specification-based assertions as test oracles," 29th Annual IEEE/NASA Software Engineering Workshop, Greenbelt, Maryland, 6-7 April 2005.
• David Coppit and Benjamin Cox, "Software plans for separation of concerns," Third AOSD Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software, Lancaster, UK, 22 March 2004.
• David Coppit, Joanne Bechta Dugan, and Kevin J. Sullivan, "The Galileo/ASSAP dynamic fault tree modeling and analysis tool," Dynamic Fault Tree Workshop, Charlottesville, Virginia, November 2001.
• David Coppit, Joanne Bechta Dugan, and Kevin J. Sullivan. "The Galileo/ASSAP dynamic fault tree tool," 2nd NASA Probabilistic Risk Assessment Workshop, Charlottesville, Virginia, June 2001.
• David Coppit, Kevin J. Sullivan, and Joanne Bechta Dugan. "The Galileo/ASSAP dynamic fault tree tool," 1st NASA Probabilistic Risk Assessment Workshop, Rockville, Maryland, October 2000.
• David Coppit and Kevin J. Sullivan. "Software engineering of critical software tools". Tutorial presented at the annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, Washington D.C., 18-20 January 1999.

Posters

• David Coppit and Jeixin Lian. "yagg: An Easy-To-Use Generator for Structured Test Inputs". 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Long Beach, California, 7-11 November 2005.

External Support

Grant Proposals Under Review

• "Software Plans: Multi-Dimensional Representations of Source Code". ($30K, Submitted to the Jeffress Memorial Trust.)
• "CAREER: Software Plans: Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns". ($578K, Submitted to the NSF CAREER Program.)

Grants

• $328,784, "Software Plans: Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns", Air Force Office of Scientific Research award number FA9550-07-1-0030, 12/1/2007 to 11/30/2009.

Subcontracts

• $55,666 University of Virginia, for NASA Grant NAS1-02078. (Only $37,833 disbursed due to NASA budget shortfalls)

Software Donations

• Edison Design Group C/C++ and Java compiler front ends
• Microsoft: Universal MSDN Subscription ($2500 value)
• Cigital: RevComp fault injection software
• Cigital: TDoG test driver generator system
• Bullseye Testing Technology: BullseyeCoverage ($800 value)

Students Supervised

Undergraduate

• Justin Manweiler. Spring 2004 to Fall 2005. "Unbiased Random Generation of Structured Test Data."
• Michael Weissberger. Spring 2003 to Spring 2004. "Location-based information dissemination."
• Benjamin Cox. Spring 2003 to Spring 2004. Undergraduate honors program. "Software plans for separation of concerns." Winner of the 1st Annual Park Undergraduate Research Award.
• Aaron Ward. Spring 2004. Independent study. "Motion capture and 3D modeling."
• Dipti Ramnarain. Fall 2002. Independent study. The "CMDB Web Application" for Capital One of Richmond.

Masters

• Jackie Murphy. Summer 2006 to present. "Random generation of test data for complex input spaces."
• Will Thomasson. Spring 2004 to Spring 2005. "An Evaluation of Software Plans for Software Development."
• Meghan Revelle. Spring 2004 to Fall 2005. "Developing Guidelines for Identifying Concerns".
• Jennifer Haddox-Schatz. January 2003 to Spring 2004. "Using Formal Specifications to Create Effective Assertions."
• Ashwin Mundra. Fall 2003 to Spring 2004. "Bounded Exhaustive Verification With Assertions."
• Robert R. Painter. Spring 2002 to Fall 2003. "Toward a Formal General Intermediate Dependability Modeling Language."

PhD

• Meghan Revelle. Fall 2005 to present. "Reverse-Engineering Software Plans from Legacy Code."
• Jiexin Lian. Summer 2004. Helped to develop yagg, software for generation of structurally complex inputs for testing.
• Robert R. Painter. Fall 2003 to present. "Software Plans for Separation of Concerns."

Service

Panels

• NSF Panelist 2005

Reviews

• Transactions on Reliability 2005
• Journal on Educational Resources in Computing 2005
• International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer 2005
• SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review 2005

Program Committees

• Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems Workshop. Portland, Oregon. November 2006.
• ISSRE 2006 Student Paper Program Committee. Raleigh, North Carolina. November 2006.
• First International Workshop on the Modeling and Analysis of Concerns in Software. St. Louis, Missouri. May 2005.

PhD Committees

• Robert Painter. (Advisor)
• Meghan Revelle. (Advisor)
• Kenneth Blakely.
• Robert Marmorstein.
• Radu Siminiceanu. Fall 2003. "Structural Model Checking"

Master's Committees

• John Robert Hott. Spring 2007.
• Jeff Walter. Spring 2005.
• Hongri Jiang. Fall 2003. "Stationary Solution of Large Continuous Time Markov Chains Using Multilevel Solution Algorithm and Memory-Efficient Kronecker Operations"
• Paul DiPalma. Fall 2003 to Fall 2004.

Departmental Committees

• Graduate curriculum committee: Fall 2006 to present.
• Undergraduate curriculum committee: Fall 2002 to present. Helped to develop a new required undergraduate course, "Software Development", for the fall of 2004.

Other Service

• Judge for ACM Programming Contest at William and Mary. 2002 and 2003.

Software Written and Maintained

This section reflects my view that software engineering researchers should actually engineer software. Such software development efforts provide research insights, as well as case studies for research ideas. Where appropriate, I have included a summary of the impact of my software.

• Spotlight: An Eclipse-based IDE that implements software plans. A software plan is a view of a module that pertains to a single relevant concern, abstracting away irrelevant concerns and simplifying the code. For example, a Java class can be implemented in terms of multiple plans that either focus on different features, or integrate features.
• Yet another generator generator (yagg): Given a grammar, generates a program that generates all possible strings of a user-specified size. This software was developed to support my research on bounded exhaustive testing.
• The Nova dynamic fault tree solver: The first dynamic fault tree solver which implements a formally-defined dynamic fault tree modeling language. Was used to help verify the correctness of the Galileo solver.
• grepmail: Searches mailboxes for messages based on regular expressions and various types of constraints. Included in the Debian Linux distribution, named application of the week 11 April 2000 on Linuxcare. Used by the FTC to scan hundreds of thousands of emails in order to find emails promoting illegal pyramid scams.
• Perl Modules: Improved Parse::Yapp, File::Cache and Mail::Box. Currently maintain Benchmark::Timer, CGI::Cache, and Getargs::Long. Developed and maintain FileHandle::Unget, and Mail::Mbox::MessageParser.
• The Galileo dynamic fault tree solver: With Ragavan Manian, helped design and implement a DFT solver for Galileo. This solver is part of Galileo/ASSAP, a version of Galileo developed for NASA and now sold by Exelix Corporation.
• News Clipper: A file processor that interprets expressions written in the News Clipper command language, replacing them with data collected from the Internet. Sold by Binary Research International in 1999, and Spinnaker Software (a company I founded) from 2000 to 2001. Most significant customer: football.com.
• Java Othello: A web-based Java server and computer player. Helped write the computer player. Cited in Elements of Web Design by Darcy DiNucci, Maria Giudice and Lynne Stiles.

Last changed January 02 2007 10:08:10. David Coppit, coppit@cs.wm.edu

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