An empirical investigation of program spectra

Harrold, Mary Jean; Rothermel, Gregg; Wu, Rui; Liu, Yi

doi:10.1145/277631.277647

Cited by 113 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…We rate the importance of entities based on their frequency of usage, i.e., we make use of program spectra (Harrold et al 1998). A program spectrum characterizes a program's behavior by recording the set of entities that are exercised as the program executes.…”

Section: Operational Profile-based Coveragementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Program spectra (Harrold et al 1998) have been used extensively in software analysis. Beyond the original application in program optimization (Ball et al 1998), more recently code profiling information has been used to analyze the executions of different versions of code, e.g., in regression testing (Xie and Notkin 2005), and to compare traces of failed and successful runs in fault diagnosis (Wong et al 2016).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Profiling of code entities according to different usage profiles is referred to as program spectra (Harrold et al 1998). The idea of using program spectra in software engineering tasks is not new: program spectra have been used, among others, for regression testing (Xie and Notkin 2005) and fault localization (Wong et al 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An assessment of operational coverage as both an adequacy and a selection criterion for operational profile based testing

Miranda

Bertolino²

2017

Software Qual J

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While the relation between code coverage measures and fault detection is actively studied, only few works have investigated the correlation between measures of coverage and of reliability. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to measuring code coverage, called the operational coverage, that takes into account how much the program's entities are exercised so to reflect the profile of usage into the measure of coverage. Operational coverage is proposed as (i) an adequacy criterion, i.e., to assess the thoroughness of a black box test suite derived from the operational profile, and as (ii) a selection criterion, i.e., to select test cases for operational profile-based testing. Our empirical evaluation showed that operational coverage is better correlated than traditional coverage with the probability that the next test case derived according to the user's profile will not fail. This result suggests that our approach could provide a good stopping rule for operational profile-based testing. With respect to test case selection, our investigations revealed that operational coverage outperformed the traditional one in terms of test suite size and fault detection capability when we look at the average results.

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Section: Operational Profile-based Coveragementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An assessment of operational coverage as both an adequacy and a selection criterion for operational profile based testing

Miranda

Bertolino²

2017

Software Qual J

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“…Depending on the amount of knowledge that is required about the system's internal component structure and behavior, the most predominant approaches can be classified as i) statistical approaches or ii) reasoning approaches (for an overview of approaches, see [2]). The former approach uses an abstraction of program traces, dynamically collected at runtime (also known as program spectra [8]), to produce a list of likely candidates to be at fault [3,10,11], whereas the latter combines a static model of the expected behavior with a set of observations to compute the diagnostic report [14]. In this paper, we use a statistical technique, in particular spectrum-based fault localization [3,10] due its effectiveness in locating faults, while entailing low time and space complexity [2].…”

Section: Background: Spectrum-based Fault Localizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spectrum-Based Fault Localization for Diagnosing Concurrency Faults

Koca

Sözer

Abreu

2013

Testing Software and Systems

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Abstract. Concurrency faults are activated by specific thread interleavings at runtime. Traditional fault localization techniques and static analysis fall short to diagnose these faults efficiently. Existing dynamic fault-localization techniques focus on pinpointing data-access patterns that are subject to concurrency faults. In this paper, we propose a spectrum-based fault localization technique for localizing faulty code blocks instead. We systematically instrument the program to create versions that run in particular combinations of thread interleavings. We run tests on all these versions and utilize spectrum-based fault localization to correlate detected errors with concurrently executing code blocks. We have implemented a tool and applied our approach on several industrial case studies. Case studies show that our approach can effectively and efficiently localize concurrency faults.

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“…The type of the applied profiling should reflect the runtime events. Software testing research and practice suggest a variety of alternatives such as statement, basic block, branch, all-uses and so on [20].…”

Section: Distribution-based Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bi-criteria Test Suite Reduction by Cluster Analysis of Execution Profiles

Khalilian

Parsa

2012

Advances in Software Engineering Techniques

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Abstract. The aim has been to minimize regression test suites while retaining fault detection capability of the test suite admissible. An appropriate minimized test suite should exercise different execution paths within a program. However, minimization of test suites may result in significant fault detection loss. To alleviate the loss, a new bi-criteria heuristic algorithm, using cluster analysis of test cases execution profiles is proposed in this paper. Cluster analysis of execution profiles categorizes test cases according to their similarity in terms of exercising a certain coverage criterion. Considering additional coverage criteria the proposed algorithm samples some test cases from each cluster. These additional criteria exercise execution paths, different from those covered by the main testing criteria. Experiments on the Siemens suite manifest the applicability of the proposed approach and present interesting insights into the use of cluster analysis to the bi-criteria test suite reduction.

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An empirical investigation of program spectra

Cited by 113 publications

References 8 publications

An assessment of operational coverage as both an adequacy and a selection criterion for operational profile based testing

An assessment of operational coverage as both an adequacy and a selection criterion for operational profile based testing

Spectrum-Based Fault Localization for Diagnosing Concurrency Faults

Bi-criteria Test Suite Reduction by Cluster Analysis of Execution Profiles

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