ISSTA

Regression test prioritization is often performed in a time constrained execution environment in which testing only occurs for a fixed time period. For example, many organizations rely upon nightly building and regression testing of their applications ...

This paper introduces the Species per Path approach to search-based software test data generation. The approach transforms the program under test into a version in which multiple paths to the search target are factored out. Test data are then sought for ...

In black-box testing, one is interested in creating a suite of tests from requirements that adequately exercise the behavior of a software system without regard to the internal structure of the implementation. In current practice, the adequacy of black ...

The popularity of object-oriented programming has led to the wide use of container libraries. It is important for the reliability of these containers that they are tested adequately. We describe techniques for automated test input generation of Java ...

Program analysis techniques are used by software engineers to deduce and infer characteristics of software systems. Recent research has suggested that a new form of program analysis technique can be created by incorporating characteristics of ...

We continue investigating the use of a negative binomial regression model to predict which files in a large industrial software system are most likely to contain many faults in the next release. A new empirical study is described whose subject is an ...

One of the main cost factors in software development is the detection and removal of defects. However, the relationships and influencing factors of the costs and revenues of defect-detection techniques are still not well understood. This paper proposes ...

This paper extends basic software-testing theory to software components and adds explicit state to the theory. The resulting theory is simple enough to abstractly model the construction of systems from their parts ('units'). It provides an ...

Finite-state verification techniques are often hampered by the stateexplosion problem. One proposed approach for addressing this problem is assume-guarantee reasoning. Using recent advances in assume-guarantee reasoning that automatically generate ...

An approach is described for checking the methods of a class against a full specification. It shares with traditional model checking the idea of exhausting the entire space of executions within some finite bounds, and with traditional verification the ...

Modern enterprise systems support Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Although RBAC allows restricting access to privileged operations, a deployer may actually intend to restrict access to privileged data. This paper presents a theoretical foundation for ...

This paper addresses the challenge of sound typestate verification, with acceptable precision, for real-world Java programs. We present a novel framework for verification of typestate properties, including several new techniques to precisely treat ...

We present a method for static program analysis that leverages tests and concrete program executions. State abstractions generalize the set of program states obtained from concrete executions. A theorem prover then checks that the generalized set of ...

We present a method to verify the correctness of parallel programs that perform complex numerical computations, including computations involving floating-point arithmetic. The method requires that a sequential version of the program be provided, to ...

Developer testing is of one of the most effective strategies for improving the quality of software, reducing its cost, and accelerating its development. Despite its widely recognized benefits, developer testing is practiced by only a minority of ...

Although static structures are often advocated as the main ingredient of a software architecture, dynamic program behavior forms an essential part of it. Verifying the behavior is a crucial yet often troublesome part of testing. Hence, it is of great ...

Static analysis has gained much attention over the past few years in applications such as bug finding and program verification. As software becomes more complex and componentized, it is common for software systems and applications to be implemented in ...

Model checking can be an effective technique for detecting concurrency-related errors in software systems. However, due to scalability issues, to handle industrial-strength software, model checking needs to be combined with powerful reduction ...

Automated tests can play a key role in ensuring system quality in software development. However, significant problems arise in automating tests of stochastic algorithms. Normally, developers write tests that simply check whether the actual result is ...

Assertions have long been used to validate the functionality of software systems. Researchers and practitioners have extended them for validation of non-functional requirements, such as performance. This paper presents the implementation and application ...

Corrupt data structures are an important cause of unacceptable program execution. Data structure repair (which eliminates inconsistencies by updating corrupt data structures to conform to consistency constraints) promises to enable many programs to ...

DSD-Crasher is a bug finding tool that follows a three-step approach to program analysis:

• D. Capture the program's intended execution behavior with dynamic invariant detection. The derived invariants exclude many unwanted values from the program's input ...

An abstract type groups variables that are used for related purposes in a program. We describe a dynamic unification-based analysis for inferring abstract types. Initially, each run-time value gets a unique abstract type. A run-time interaction among ...