ICSE 2024
Fri 12 - Sun 21 April 2024 Lisbon, Portugal
Wed 17 Apr 2024 14:00 - 14:15 at Eugénio de Andrade - Testing 2 Chair(s): Jonathan Bell

The mechanics of how a fault reveals itself as a test failure is of keen interest to software researchers and practitioners alike. An improved understanding of how faults translate to failures can guide improvements in broad facets of software testing, ranging from test suite design to automated program repair, which are premised on the understanding that the presence of faults would alter some test executions. In this work, we study such effects by mutations, as applicable in mutation testing. Mutation testing enables the generation of a large corpus of faults; thereby harvesting a large pool of mutated test runs for analysis. Specifically, we analyze more than 1.1 million mutated test runs to study if and how the underlying mutations induce infections that propagate their way to observable failures. We adopt a broad-spectrum approach to analyze such a large pool of mutated runs. For every mutated test run, we are able to determine: (a) if the mutation induced a state infection; (b) if the infection propagated through the end of the test run; and (c) if the test failed in the presence of a propagated infection. By examining such infection-, propagation- and revealability- effects for more than 43,000 mutations executed across 1.1 million test runs, we are able to arrive at some surprising findings. Our results find that once state infection is observed, propagation is frequently detected; however, a propagated infection does not always reveal itself as a test failure. We also find that a significant portion of survived mutants in our study could have been killed by observing propagated state infections that were left undetected. Finally, we also find that different mutation operators can demonstrate substantial differences in their specific impacts on the execution-to-failure ripples of the resulting mutations.

Wed 17 Apr

Displayed time zone: Lisbon change

14:00 - 15:30
14:00
15m
Talk
Ripples of a Mutation — An Empirical Study of Propagation Effects in Mutation Testing
Research Track
Hang Du University of California at Irvine, Vijay Krishna Palepu Microsoft, James Jones University of California at Irvine
DOI
14:15
15m
Talk
Fast Deterministic Black-box Context-free Grammar Inference
Research Track
Mohammad Rifat Arefin The University of Texas at Arlington, Suraj Shetiya University of Texas at Arlington, Zili Wang Iowa State University, Christoph Csallner University of Texas at Arlington
Pre-print Media Attached
14:30
15m
Talk
Bridging Theory to Practice in Software Testing Teaching through Team-based Learning (TBL) and Open Source Software (OSS) Contribution
Software Engineering Education and Training
Elaine Venson University of Brasilia, Reem Alfayez King Saud University
14:45
15m
Talk
Productive Coverage: Improving the Actionability of Code Coverage
Software Engineering in Practice
Marko Ivanković Google; Universität Passau, Goran Petrović Google Inc, Yana Kulizhskaya Google Inc, Mateusz Lewko Google Inc, Luka Kalinovčić No affiliation, René Just University of Washington, Gordon Fraser University of Passau
15:00
15m
Talk
Taming Timeout Flakiness: An Empirical Study of SAP HANA
Software Engineering in Practice
Alexander Berndt University of Mannheim, Sebastian Baltes University of Bayreuth, Thomas Bach SAP
Pre-print
15:15
7m
Talk
Testing Abstractions for Cyber-Physical Control Systems
Journal-first Papers
Claudio Mandrioli University of Luxembourg, Max Nyberg Carlsson Lund University, Martina Maggio Saarland University, Germany / Lund University, Sweden
Pre-print
15:22
7m
Talk
FaultFuzz: A Coverage Guided Fault Injection Tool for Distributed Systems
Demonstrations
Wenhan Feng Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qiugen Pei Joint Laboratory on Cyberspace Security China Southern Power Grid, Yu Gao Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Dong Wang Institute of software, Chinese academy of sciences, Wensheng Dou Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jun Wei Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Chongqing School, Zheheng Liang Joint Laboratory on Cyberspace Security of China Southern Power Grid, Zhenyue Long Joint Laboratory on Cyberspace Security China Southern Power Grid
Pre-print