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A semantic model of program faults

Authors:

A. Jefferson Offutt,

J. Huffman HayesAuthors Info & Claims

ISSTA '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Software testing and analysis

Pages 195 - 200

https://doi.org/10.1145/229000.226317

Published: 01 May 1996 Publication History

Abstract

Program faults are artifacts that are widely studied, but there are many aspects of faults that we still do not understand. In addition to the simple fact that one important goal during testing is to cause failures and thereby detect faults, a full understanding of the characteristics of faults is crucial to several research areas in testing. These include fault-based testing, testability, mutation testing, and the comparative evaluation of testing strategies. In this workshop paper, we explore the fundamental nature of faults by looking at the differences between a syntactic and semantic characterization of faults. We offer definitions of these characteristics and explore the differentiation. Specifically, we discuss the concept of "size" of program faults --- the measurement of size provides interesting and useful distinctions between the syntactic and semantic characterization of faults. We use the fault size observations to make several predictions about testing and present preliminary data that supports this model. We also use the model to offer explanations about several questions that have intrigued testing researchers.

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Cited By

Ojdanic MGarg AKhanfir ADegiovanni RPapadakis MLe Traon Y(2023)Syntactic Versus Semantic Similarity of Artificial and Real Faults in Mutation Testing StudiesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.327756449:7(3922-3938)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2023.3277564
Lin HWang YGong YJin D(2019)Domain-RIP Analysis: A Technique for Analyzing Mutation StubbornnessIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2018.28837767(4006-4023)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2883776
Jimenez MCheckam TCordy MPapadakis MKintis MTraon YHarman MOivo MMéndez DMockus A(2018)Are mutants really natural?Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3239235.3240500(1-10)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3239235.3240500
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cover image ACM Conferences

ISSTA '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Software testing and analysis

May 1996

294 pages

ISBN:0897917871

DOI:10.1145/229000

Editors:
Steve J. Zeil
Old Dominion Univ., Norfolk, VA
,
Will Tracz
Loral Federal Systems, Owego, NY

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes Volume 21, Issue 3
May 1996
293 pages
ISSN:0163-5948
DOI:10.1145/226295
Editors:
Steven J. Zeil
Old Dominion Univ., Norfolk, VA
,
Will Tracz
Loral Federal Systems, Owego, NY
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Copyright © 1996 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 01 May 1996

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ISSTA96: International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

January 8 - 10, 1996

California, San Diego, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 58 of 213 submissions, 27%

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Cited By

Ojdanic MGarg AKhanfir ADegiovanni RPapadakis MLe Traon Y(2023)Syntactic Versus Semantic Similarity of Artificial and Real Faults in Mutation Testing StudiesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.327756449:7(3922-3938)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2023.3277564
Lin HWang YGong YJin D(2019)Domain-RIP Analysis: A Technique for Analyzing Mutation StubbornnessIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2018.28837767(4006-4023)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2883776
Jimenez MCheckam TCordy MPapadakis MKintis MTraon YHarman MOivo MMéndez DMockus A(2018)Are mutants really natural?Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3239235.3240500(1-10)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3239235.3240500
Sousa LVincenzi ADelamaro MVieira IMendonca VRodrigues C(2018)Reducing the Cost of Mutation Testing Using the Semantic Size of Mutant2018 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)10.1109/SMC.2018.00457(2675-2680)Online publication date: Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/SMC.2018.00457
Gong WZhang GZhou X(2017)Learn to Accelerate Identifying New Test Cases in FuzzingSecurity, Privacy, and Anonymity in Computation, Communication, and Storage10.1007/978-3-319-72389-1_24(298-307)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72389-1_24
Zhou LFu SGuo THan LCui B(2016)Design and Implementation of a C++ Memory Leak Detection Tool Based on Dynamic Instrumentation2016 10th International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing (IMIS)10.1109/IMIS.2016.47(149-153)Online publication date: Jul-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/IMIS.2016.47
Belli FBeyazit M(2015)Exploiting Model Morphology for Event-Based TestingIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2014.236069041:2(113-134)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2014.2360690
Kurtz BAmmann POffutt J(2015)Static analysis of mutant subsumption2015 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)10.1109/ICSTW.2015.7107454(1-10)Online publication date: Apr-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTW.2015.7107454
Khan TMuzammal MIjaz A(2015)On Effectiveness of Fault-Seeding Using Interaction PatternsProceedings of the 2015 13th International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology (FIT)10.1109/FIT.2015.31(119-124)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/FIT.2015.31
Delahaye MBousquet L(2015)Selecting a software engineering toolSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.231245:7(875-891)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/spe.2312
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