Software Testing Verification & Reliability最新文献

{"title":"Combinatorial methods for testing Internet of Things smart home systems","authors":"Bernhard Garn, Dominik Schreiber, D. Simos, D. R. Kuhn, J. Voas, R. Kacker","doi":"10.1002/stvr.1805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1805","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we report on applying combinatorial testing to Internet of Things (IoT) home automation hub systems. We detail how to create a dedicated input parameter model of an IoT home automation hub system for use with combinatorial test case generation strategies. Further, we developed an automated test execution framework and two test oracles for evaluation purposes. We applied and evaluated our proposed methodological approach to a real‐world IoT system and analysed the obtained results of various combinatorial test sets with different properties generated based on the derived input model. Additionally, we compare these results to a random testing approach. Our empirical testing evaluations revealed multiple errors in the tested devices and also showed that all considered approaches performed nearly equally well.","PeriodicalId":49506,"journal":{"name":"Software Testing Verification & Reliability","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79475363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A mapping study on mutation testing for mobile applications","authors":"Henrique Neves da Silva, Jackson A. Prado Lima, S. Vergilio, A. T. Endo","doi":"10.1002/stvr.1801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1801","url":null,"abstract":"The use of mutation testing for mobile applications (apps for short) is still a challenge. Mobile apps are usually event‐driven and encompass graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and a complex execution environment. Then, they require mutant operators to describe specific apps faults, and the automation of the mutation process phases like execution and analysis of the mutants is not an easy task. To encourage research addressing such challenges, this paper presents results from a mapping study on mutation testing for mobile apps. Following a systematic plan, we found 16 primary studies that were analysed according to three aspects: (i) trends and statistics about the field; (ii) study characteristics such as focus, proposed operators and automated support for the mutation testing phases; and (iii) evaluation aspects. The great majority of studies (98%) have been published in the last 3 years. The most addressed language is Java, and Android is the only operating system considered. Mutant operators of GUI and configuration types are prevalent in a total of 138 operators found. Most studies implement a supporting tool, but few tools support mutant execution and analysis. The evaluation conducted by the studies includes apps mainly from the finance and utility domain. Nevertheless, there is a lack of benchmarks and more rigorous experiments. Future research should address other specific types of faults, languages, and operating systems. They should offer support for mutant execution and analysis, as well as to reduce the mutation testing cost and limitations in the mobile context.","PeriodicalId":49506,"journal":{"name":"Software Testing Verification & Reliability","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85928361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"HOTFUZ: Cost‐effective higher‐order mutation‐based fault localization","authors":"Jong-In Jang, Duksan Ryu, Jong-Chan Baik","doi":"10.1002/stvr.1802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1802","url":null,"abstract":"Fault localization techniques are used to deduce the exact source of a failure from a set of failure indications while debugging software and play a crucial role in improving software quality. Mutation‐based fault localization (MBFL) techniques are proposed to localize faults at a finer granularity and with higher accuracy than traditional fault localization techniques. Despite the technique's effectiveness, the immense cost of mutation analysis hinders MBFL's practical application in the industry. Various mutation alternative strategies are utilized to lower the cost of MBFL, but they sacrifice the accuracy of localization results. Higher‐order mutation testing was proposed to search for valuable mutants that drive testing harder and reduce the overall test effort. However, higher‐order mutants (HOMs) never have been used to address the cost problem of MBFL to the extent of our knowledge. This paper proposes a novel, cost‐effective MBFL technique called HOTFUZ, Higher‐Order muTation‐based FaUlt localiZation, that employs HOMs to reduce the cost while minimizing the accuracy degradation. HOTFUZ combines mutants of a program under test into HOMs to decrease the number of mutants by more than half, depending on the order of HOMs. An experimental study is conducted using 65 real‐world faults of CoREBench to assess the proposed approach's cost‐effectiveness. The experimental results show that HOTFUZ outperforms the extant mutation alternative strategies by localizing faults more accurately using the same number of mutants executed. HOTFUZ has three main benefits over existing mutant reduction techniques for MBFL: (a) It keeps the advantage of using the whole set of mutation operators; (b) it does not discard generated mutants randomly for the sake of efficiency; and, finally, (c) it significantly decreases the proportion of equivalent mutants.","PeriodicalId":49506,"journal":{"name":"Software Testing Verification & Reliability","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82148627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Model checking, testing and debugging","authors":"R. Hierons, Tao Xie","doi":"10.1002/stvr.1803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1803","url":null,"abstract":"This issue contains four papers. The first paper focuses on model checking, the second and third papers focus on testing and the last paper focuses on debugging. The first paper, ‘Model checking C++ programs’ by Felipe R. Monteiro, Mikhail R. Gadelha and Lucas C. Cordeiro, is motivated by memory safety issues and how these have proved to be a source of security vulnerabilities. The authors devised a novel bounded model checking approach. The first step was to encode a number of C++ features in a decidable fragment of first-order logic. SMT solvers were then used to carry out verification. In experiments, the proposed approach was found to outperform state-of-the-art verifiers. The prototype tool also found arithmeticoverflow errors in a commercial application. (Recommended by Professor Pretscher) The second paper, ‘GPU acceleration of finite state machine input execution: Improving scale and performance’, by Vanya Yaneva, Ajitha Rajan and Christophe Dubach looks at the problem of executing a large number of tests on a finite state machine (FSM). The motivation for this work is model validation. The approach devised uses GPUs to allow multiple tests to be run in parallel. The authors built on their previous work, which showed how FSM execution can be performed on a GPU, by addressing a number of limitations. In particular, the authors addressed the data transfer overhead and they also performed experiments with FSMs that were too large to fit into GPU memory. In the experiments, the novel optimisations led to further improvements, with the GPU being over four times faster, on average, than a 16-core CPU. (Recommended by Professor Pretscher) The third paper, ‘Survey on test case generation, selection and prioritization for cyber-physical systems’, by Zahra Sadri-Moshkenani, Justin Bradley and Gregg Rothermel, presents a survey of approaches that generate, select or prioritise test cases for cyber-physical systems. The authors identified 34 related papers (26 papers on test generation, 6 papers on test selection and 7 papers on test prioritisation) and classified them according to 8 properties distilled by the authors from past experience. From the survey results, the authors identified a number of open challenges. To address some of these challenges, existing approaches may be adapted or new approaches may be developed. (Recommended by Professor Phil McMinn) The fourth paper, ‘Effective fault localization and context-aware debugging for concurrent programs’, by Justin Chu, Tingting Yu, Jane Huffman Hayes, Xue Han and Yu Zhao, presents Coadec, an approach for automatically generating interthread control flow paths to diagnose concurrency bugs. Coadec consists of two phases: concurrency fault localization and context-aware debugging. The authors evaluated Coadec on 10 real-world multithreaded Java applications and showed that Coadec outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for localising concurrency faults and that Coadec’s context debugging can help ","PeriodicalId":49506,"journal":{"name":"Software Testing Verification & Reliability","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88219290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Property generation/verification and empirical studies","authors":"R. Hierons, Tao Xie","doi":"10.1002/stvr.1800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1800","url":null,"abstract":"This issue contains four papers. The first and third papers focus on property generation and property verification, respectively, while the second and fourth papers focus on empirical studies of a fault prediction algorithm and test flakiness, respectively. The first paper, “Documentation-based functional constraint generation for library methods,” by Renhe Jiang, Zhengzhao Chen, Yu Pei, Minxue Pan, Tian Zhang, and Xuandong Li, proposes DOC2SMT, an approach that generates functional constraints for library methods based on their documentations. DOC2SMT first translates a method’s documentation into candidate constraint clauses, which are then filtered based on static and dynamic validations. The experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of DOC2SMT and also show the benefits of the generated constraints for symbolic-execution-based test generation (recommended by Peter Müller). The second paper, “An empirical study of Linespots: A novel past-fault algorithm,” by Maximilian Scholz and Richard Torkar, proposes a new fault prediction algorithm called Linespots. The authors focus on fault prediction based on past faults and refine a previous algorithm (Bugspots). Interestingly, they used a different granularity: line as opposed to file, and this necessitated the development of a benchmark set of experimental subjects. In experiments, Linespots was found to outperform Bugspots (recommended by Xiaoyin Wang). The third paper, “Integrating pattern matching and abstract interpretation for verifying cautions of microcontrollers,” by Thuy Nguyen, Takashi Tomita, Junpei Endo, and Toshiaki Aoki, proposes a semi-automatic approach for verifying cautions, which are hardware-dependent properties described in microcontrollers hardware manuals. For this approach, the authors integrate pattern matching and abstract interpretation, two static program analysis techniques. The experimental results show the feasibility and applicability of the approach (recommended by Marcio Delamaro). The fourth paper, “Empirical analysis of practitioners’ perceptions of test flakiness factors,” by Azeem Ahmad, Ola Leifler, and Kristian Sandahl, concerns flaky tests. A flaky test is one where different executions with the same test can lead to different outcomes/verdicts. The authors explore developer perception regarding factors that affect flakiness, concentrating on developers of closed-source software. They also examine two test suites and identify the test smells that lead to flakiness (recommended by Mike Papadakis).","PeriodicalId":49506,"journal":{"name":"Software Testing Verification & Reliability","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83656010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Effective fault localization and context‐aware debugging for concurrent programs","authors":"J. Chu, Tingting Yu, J. Hayes, Xue Han, Yu Zhao","doi":"10.1002/stvr.1797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1797","url":null,"abstract":"Concurrent programs are difficult to debug because concurrency faults usually occur under specific inputs and thread interleavings. Fault localization techniques for sequential programs are often ineffective because the root causes of concurrency faults involve memory accesses across multiple threads rather than single statements. Previous research has proposed techniques to analyse passing and failing executions obtained from running a set of test cases for identifying faulty memory access patterns. However, stand‐alone access patterns do not provide enough contextual information, such as the path leading to the failure, for developers to understand the bug. We present an approach, Coadec, to automatically generate interthread control flow paths that can link memory access patterns that occurred most frequently in the failing executions to better diagnose concurrency bugs. Coadec consists of two phases. In the first phase, we use feature selection techniques from machine learning to localize suspicious memory access patterns based on failing and passing executions. The patterns with maximum feature diversity information can point to the most suspicious pattern. We then apply a data mining technique and identify the memory access patterns that occurred most frequently in the failing executions. Finally, Coadec identifies faulty program paths by connecting both the frequent patterns and the suspicious pattern. We also evaluate the effectiveness of fault localization using test suites generated from different test adequacy criteria. We introduce and have evaluated Coadec on 10 real‐world multithreaded Java applications. Results indicate that Coadec outperforms state‐of‐the‐art approaches for localizing concurrency faults and that Coadec's context debugging can help developers understand concurrency fault by inspecting a small percentage of code.","PeriodicalId":49506,"journal":{"name":"Software Testing Verification & Reliability","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80645927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Adaptive or embedded software testing and mutation testing","authors":"R. Hierons, Tao Xie","doi":"10.1002/stvr.1798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1798","url":null,"abstract":"This issue contains four papers. The first paper provides a survey of work on testing adaptive and context-aware systems, while the second one concerns testing embedded systems. The remaining two papers explore particular problems associated with an area well known to most STVR readers: mutation testing. The first paper, ‘Testing of adaptive and context-aware systems: Approaches and challenges’, by Bento R. Siqueira, Fabiano C. Ferrari, Kathiani E. Souza, Valter V. Camargo and Rogério de Lemos, introduces a systematic literature review and a thematic analysis of studies to characterize the state of the art in testing adaptive systems (ASs) and context-aware systems (CASs) and discuss approaches, challenges, observed trends and research limitations and directions. The authors discover recurring research concerns related to AS and CAS testing (such as generation of test cases and built-in tests), recurring testing challenges (such as context monitoring and runtime decisions), some trends (such as model-based testing and hybrid techniques) and some little investigated issues (such as uncertainty and prediction of changes). (Recommended by T.Y. Chen) The second paper, ‘Remote embedded devices test framework on the cloud’, by Il-Seok (Benjamin) Choi and Chang-Sung Jeong, introduces a remote embedded device test framework on the cloud named RED-TFC, whose reliability test manager component can automatically perform various tests for evaluating reliability and performance of distributed shared devices by utilizing the cloud concept. RED-TFC includes two major techniques: the adaptive sample scale for reliability test (ASRT) and the mass sample reliability test (MSRT). The authors analyse two Android smartphone models that include many embedded components and show that RED-TFC can help detect a high number of reliability problems in smartphones. (Recommended by Tanja Vos) The third paper, ‘Analysing the combination of cost reduction techniques in Android mutation testing’, by Macario Polo-Usaola and Isyed Rodríguez-Trujillo, concerns the use of mutation testing when testing mobile apps. As the authors note, when testing an app, one typically deploys the app and its mutants on mobile devices or executes them on an emulator. Doing so increases the test execution time. Naturally, it can also significantly increase the cost of mutation testing, especially when there are many mutants. The authors investigate several techniques that have been devised for reducing execution time in mutation testing and produce a mathematical model with the aim of predicting the time taken when some combination of these techniques is used. (Recommended by Mike Papadakis) The final paper is ‘An ensemble-based predictive mutation testing approach that considers impact of unreached mutants’ by Alireza Aghamohammadi and Seyed-Hassan Mirian-Hosseinabadi. This paper also concerns both mutation testing and prediction. However, the authors look at a different prediction problem: that of","PeriodicalId":49506,"journal":{"name":"Software Testing Verification & Reliability","volume":"113 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84905434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"GPU acceleration of finite state machine input execution: Improving scale and performance","authors":"Vanya Yaneva, A. Rajan, Christophe Dubach","doi":"10.1002/stvr.1796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1796","url":null,"abstract":"Model‐based development is a popular development approach in which software is implemented and verified based on a model of the required system. Finite state machines (FSMs) are widely used as models for systems in several domains. Validating that a model accurately represents the required behaviour involves the generation and execution of a large number of input sequences, which is often an expensive and time‐consuming process. In this paper, we speed up the execution of input sequences for FSM validation, by leveraging the high degree of parallelism of modern graphics processing units (GPUs) for the automatic execution of FSM input sequences in parallel on the GPU threads. We expand our existing work by providing techniques that improve the performance and scalability of this approach. We conduct extensive empirical evaluation using 15 large FSMs from the networking domain and measure GPU speed‐up over a 16‐core CPU, taking into account total GPU time, which includes both data transfer and kernel execution time. We found that GPUs execute FSM input sequences up to 9.28× faster than a 16‐core CPU, with an average speed‐up of 4.53× across all subjects. Our optimizations achieve an average improvement over existing work of 58.95% for speed‐up and scalability to large FSMs with over 2K states and 500K transitions. We also found that techniques aimed at reducing the number of required input sequences for large FSMs with high density were ineffective when applied to all‐transition pair coverage, thus emphasizing the need for approaches like ours that speed up input execution.","PeriodicalId":49506,"journal":{"name":"Software Testing Verification & Reliability","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90833737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Metamorphic relation prioritization for effective regression testing","authors":"Madhusudan Srinivasan, Upulee Kanewala","doi":"10.1002/stvr.1807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1807","url":null,"abstract":"Metamorphic testing (MT) is widely used for testing programs that face the oracle problem. It uses a set of metamorphic relations (MRs), which are relations among multiple inputs and their corresponding outputs to determine whether the program under test is faulty. Typically, MRs vary in their ability to detect faults in the program under test, and some MRs tend to detect the same set of faults. In this paper, we propose approaches to prioritize MRs to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of MT for regression testing. We present two MR prioritization approaches: (i) fault‐based and (ii) coverage‐based. To evaluate these MR prioritization approaches, we conduct experiments on three complex open‐source software systems. Our results show that the MR prioritization approaches developed by us significantly outperform the current practice of executing the source and follow‐up test cases of the MRs in an ad‐hoc manner in terms of fault detection effectiveness. Further, fault‐based MR prioritization leads to reducing the number of source and follow‐up test cases that needs to be executed as well as reducing the average time taken to detect a fault, which would result in saving time and cost during the testing process.","PeriodicalId":49506,"journal":{"name":"Software Testing Verification & Reliability","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73771014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Survey on test case generation, selection and prioritization for cyber‐physical systems","authors":"Zahra Sadri‐Moshkenani, Justin Bradley, G. Rothermel","doi":"10.1002/stvr.1794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1794","url":null,"abstract":"A cyber‐physical system (CPS) is a collection of computing devices that communicate with each other, operate in the target environment via actuators and interact with the physical world through sensors in a feedback loop. CPSs need to be safe and reliable and function in accordance with their requirements. Testing, focusing on a CPS model and/or its code, is the primary approach used by engineers to achieve this. Generating, selecting and prioritizing test cases that can reveal faults in CPSs, from the wide range of possible input values and stimuli that affect their operation, are of central importance in this process. To date, however, in our search of the literature, we have found no comprehensive survey of research on test case generation, selection and prioritization for CPSs. In this article, therefore, we report the results of a survey of approaches for generating, selecting and prioritizing test cases for CPSs; the results illustrate the progress that has been made on these approaches to date, the properties that characterize the approaches and the challenges that remain open in these areas of research.","PeriodicalId":49506,"journal":{"name":"Software Testing Verification & Reliability","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84500814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}