In software testing, the program under test is usually executed with test inputs and checked against a test oracle, which is a mechanism to verify whether the program behaves as expected. Selecting the right oracle data to observe is crucial in test ...

Symbolic execution is a widely-used program analysis technique. It collects and solves path conditions to guide the program traversing. However, due to the limitation of the current constraint solvers, it is difficult to apply symbolic execution on ...

Given two test cases, one larger and one smaller, the smaller test case is preferred for many purposes. A smaller test case usually runs faster, is easier to understand, and is more convenient for debugging. However, smaller test cases also tend to ...

Various information retrieval (IR) based techniques have been proposed recently to locate bugs automatically at the file level. However, their usefulness is often compromised by the coarse granularity of files and the lack of contextual information. To ...

Continuous integration (CI) systems automate the compilation, building, and testing of software. Despite CI rising as a big success story in automated software engineering, it has received almost no attention from the research community. For example, ...

Runtime verification can be used to find bugs early, during software development, by monitoring test executions against formal specifications (specs). The quality of runtime verification depends on the quality of the specs. While previous research has ...

Detecting lock-related defects has long been a hot research topic in software engineering. Many efforts have been spent on detecting such deadlocks in concurrent software systems. However, latent locks may be hidden in application programming interface ...

Program coverage is used across many stages of software development. While common during testing, program coverage has also found use outside the test lab, in production software. However, production software has stricter requirements on run-time ...

Program Analysis has been a rich and fruitful field of research for many decades, and countless high quality program analysis tools have been produced by academia. Though there are some well-known examples of tools that have found their way into ...

Mutation operators have been studied at length to determine which ones are the ``best" at some metric (for example creates the least equivalent mutants, creates hard-to-kill mutants, etc.). These studies though have focused on specific test suites, ...

Security testing is a pivotal activity in engineering secure software. It consists of two phases: generating attack inputs to test the system, and assessing whether test executions expose any vulnerabilities. The latter phase is known as the security ...

During maintenance, developers often need to understand the purpose of a test. One of the most potentially useful sources of information for understanding a test is its name. Ideally, test names are descriptive in that they accurately summarize both ...

To improve software reliability, many rule-based techniques have been proposed to infer programming rules and detect violations of these rules as bugs. These rule-based approaches often rely on the highly frequent appearances of certain patterns in a ...

Combinatorial testing aims at covering the interactions of parameters in a system under test, while some combinations may be forbidden by given constraints (forbidden tuples). In this paper, we illustrate that such forbidden tuples correspond to ...

It is difficult to test programs that input images, due to the large number of (pixel) values that must be chosen and the complex ways these values interact. Typically, such programs are tested manually, using images that have known results. However, ...

Software updates often introduce new bugs to existing code bases. Prior regression testing tools focus mainly on test case selection and prioritization whereas symbolic execution tools only handle code changes in sequential software. In this paper, we ...

With the growing complexity of software, the number of test cases needed for effective validation is extremely large. Executing these large test suites is expensive, both in terms of time and energy. Cache misses are known to be one of the main factors ...

Big data applications (e.g., Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) applications) are designed to handle great volumes of data. However, processing such great volumes of data is time-consuming. There is a need to construct small yet effective test data ...

Mobile systems usually support an event-based model of concurrent programming. This model, although advantageous to maintain responsive user interfaces, may lead to subtle concurrency errors due to unforeseen threads interleaving coupled with non-...

Stored procedures in database management systems are often used to implement complex business logic. Correctness of these procedures is critical for correct working of the system. However, testing them remains difficult due to many possible states of ...