Data flow testing has recently attracted new interest in the context of testing object oriented systems, since data flow information is well suited to capture relations among the object states, and can thus provide useful information for testing method ...

Identifying equivalent mutants remains the largest impediment to the widespread uptake of mutation testing. Despite being researched for more than three decades, the problem remains. We propose Trivial Compiler Equivalence (TCE) a technique that ...

Debugging is an indispensable yet frustrating activity in software development and maintenance. Thus, numerous techniques have been proposed to aid this task. Despite the demonstrated effectiveness and future potential of these techniques, many of them ...

Software bugs can cause significant financial loss and even the loss of human lives. To reduce such loss, developers devote substantial efforts to fixing bugs, which generally requires much expertise and experience. Various approaches have been proposed ...

Binary analysis is a well-investigated area in software engineering and security. Given real-world program binaries, generating test inputs which cause the binaries to crash is crucial. Generation of crashing inputs has many applications including off-...

Predictive trace analysis (PTA) is an effective approach for detecting subtle bugs in concurrent programs. Existing PTA techniques, however, are typically based on adhoc algorithms tailored to low-level errors such as data races or atomicity violations, ...

Multi-threaded programs play an increasingly important role in current multi-core environments. Exposing concurrency bugs and debugging such multi-threaded programs have become quite challenging due to their inherent non-determinism. In order to ...

The reliability of a prediction model depends on the quality of the data from which it was trained. Therefore, defect prediction models may be unreliable if they are trained using noisy data. Recent research suggests that randomly-injected noise that ...

Before a community can learn general principles, it must share individual experiences. Data sharing is the fundamental step of cross project defect prediction, i.e. the process of using data from one project to predict for defects in another. Prior work ...

Defect prediction models help software quality assurance teams to effectively allocate their limited resources to the most defect-prone software modules. A variety of classification techniques have been used to build defect prediction models ranging ...

Asserts have long been a strongly recommended (if non-functional) adjunct to programs. They certainly don't add any user-evident feature value; and it can take quite some skill and effort to devise and add useful asserts. However, they are believed to ...

Static analysis tools help developers find bugs, improve code readability, and ensure consistent style across a project. However, these tools can be difficult to smoothly integrate with each other and into the developer workflow, particularly when ...

The surge of search based software engineering research has been hampered by the need to develop customized search algorithms for different classes of the same problem. For instance, two decades of bespoke Combinatorial Interaction Testing (CIT) ...

Software Fault Injection (SFI) is an established technique for assessing the robustness of a software under test by exposing it to faults in its operational environment. Depending on the complexity of this operational environment, the complexity of the ...

Testing is a key element of software development processes for the management and assessment of product quality. In most development environments, the software engineers are responsible for ensuring the functional correctness of code. However, for large ...

Regression occurs when code changes introduce failures in previously passing test cases. As software evolves, regressions may be introduced. Fixing regression errors manually is time-consuming and error-prone. We propose an approach of automated repair ...

Automatic bug fixing has become a promising direction for reducing manual effort in debugging. However, general approaches to automatic bug fixing may face some fundamental difficulties. In this paper, we argue that automatic fixing of specific types of ...

Recent advances in program repair techniques have raised the possibility of patching bugs automatically. For an automatically generated patch to be accepted by developers, it should not only resolve the bug but also satisfy certain human-related factors ...

Many interesting questions about the software quality of a code base can only be answered adequately if fine-grained information about the evolution of quality metrics over time and the contributions of individual developers is known. We present an ...

Regression testing is widely used in practice for validating program changes. However, running large regression suites can be costly. Researchers have developed several techniques for prioritizing tests such that the higher-priority tests have a higher ...