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On the adoption of MC/DC and control-flow adequacy for a tight integration of program testing and statistical fault localization (2013)
| Venue: | INFORMATION AND SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY |
| Citations: | 2 - 1 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Jiang13onthe,
author = {Bo Jiang and Ke Zhai and W. K. Chan and T. H. Tse and Zhenyu Zhang},
title = {On the adoption of MC/DC and control-flow adequacy for a tight integration of program testing and statistical fault localization},
journal = {INFORMATION AND SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY},
year = {2013},
volume = {55},
number = {5},
pages = {897--917}
}
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Abstract
Context: Testing and debugging consume a significant portion of software development effort. Both processes are usually conducted independently despite their close relationship with each other. Test adequacy is vital for developers to assure that sufficient testing effort has been made, while finding all the faults in a program as soon as possible is equally important. A tight integration between testing and debugging activities is essential. Objective: The paper aims at finding whether three factors, namely, the adequacy criterion to gauge a test suite, the size of a prioritized test suite, and the percentage of such a test suite used in fault localization, have significant impacts on integrating test case prioritization techniques with statistical fault localization techniques. Method: We conduct a controlled experiment to investigate the effectiveness of applying adequate test suites to locate faults in a benchmark suite of seven Siemens programs and four real-life UNIX utility programs using three adequacy criteria, 16 test case prioritization techniques, and four statistical fault localization techniques. We measure the proportion of code needed to be examined in order to locate a fault as the effectiveness of statistical fault localization techniques. We also investigate the integration of test case prioritization and statistical fault localization with postmortem analysis. Result: The main result shows that on average, it is more effective for a statistical fault localization technique to utilize the execution results of a MC/DC-adequate test suite than those of a branch-adequate test suite, and is in turn more effective to utilize the execution results of a branch-adequate test suite than those of a statement-adequate test suite. On the other hand,
Keyphrases
tight integration statistical fault localization technique statistical fault localization mc dc control-flow adequacy program testing adequacy criterion branch-adequate test suite test case prioritization technique execution result test suite statement-adequate test suite fault localization postmortem analysis real-life unix utility program close relationship siemens program significant impact test case prioritization benchmark suite significant portion prioritized test suite adequate test suite mc dc-adequate test suite test adequacy controlled experiment software development effort main result show
