As we know, branding in software engineering research is very important. One might not suspect it, as one might expect results and concepts to prime over such considerations, but branding is surprisingly influential ...
I went through some additional literature on software fuzzing, a fashionable research topic. I had realized it before but it became even more evident: fuzzing now refers to any testing technique based on some form of randomized strategy, in combination or not with other techniques such as symbolic execution (white-box fuzzing).
All this is fine, except that a great deal of work has been investigating similar objectives using different keywords (branding) such as test case generation, security or vulnerability testing, search-based testing. I noticed that this past and current work is largely missing from the discussions of related work and future work in fuzzing papers. For example, some papers refer to fuzz testing of cyber-physical systems as necessary future work. Interesting, except that there is a great deal of existing work that could be characterized as "fuzzing" such systems, as they use some form of randomized strategy, combined with other techniques, to generate inputs and detect failures. There are many other such examples.
We have to be careful about this. Branding should not hamper scientific progress by artificially leading to distinguishing concepts that are similar, ignoring existing work, or dividing research communities.
Lionel C. Briand is professor of software engineering and has shared appointments between (1) The University of Ottawa, Canada, where he holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) and (2) Ireland's Lero Centre for Software Research, where he holds the position of Director. In collaboration with colleagues, over 30 years, he has run many collaborative research projects with companies in the automotive, satellite, aerospace, energy, financial, and legal domains. Lionel has held various engineering, academic, and leading positions in seven countries. He was one of the founders of the ICST conference (IEEE Int. Conf. on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, a CORE A event) and its first general chair. He was also EiC of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) for 13 years and led, in collaboration with first Victor Basili and then Tom Zimmermann, the journal to the top tier of the very best publication venues in software engineering.
Lionel was elevated to the grades of IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow for his work on software testing and verification. He was granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills award, the ACM SIGSOFT outstanding research award, and the IEEE Reliability Society engineer-of-the-year award, respectively in 2012, 2022, and 2013. He received an ERC Advanced grant in 2016 — on the topic of modelling and testing cyber-physical systems — which is the most prestigious individual research award in the European Union. In 2023, he was elevated to the rank of fellow of the Academy of Science, Royal Society of Canada. He currently holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) on "Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance". His research interests include: Trustworthy AI, software testing and verification, applications of AI in software engineering, model-driven software development, requirements engineering, and empirical software engineering.