Related papers: Software Mutational Robustness
Context: Mutation Testing (MT) is an important tool in traditional Software Engineering (SE) white-box testing. It aims to artificially inject faults in a system to evaluate a test suite's capability to detect them, assuming that the test…
A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…
Genetic Algorithms are a popular set of optimization algorithms often used to aid software testing. However, no work has been done to apply systematic software testing techniques to genetic algorithms because of the stochasticity and the…
Non-adversarial robustness, also known as natural robustness, is a property of deep learning models that enables them to maintain performance even when faced with distribution shifts caused by natural variations in data. However, achieving…
Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both…
The Software Naturalness hypothesis argues that programming languages can be understood through the same techniques used in natural language processing. We explore this hypothesis through the use of a pre-trained transformer-based language…
Software developers attempt to reproduce software bugs to understand their erroneous behaviours and to fix them. Unfortunately, they often fail to reproduce (or fix) them, which leads to faulty, unreliable software systems. However, to…
Machine learning (ML) provides us with numerous opportunities, allowing ML systems to adapt to new situations and contexts. At the same time, this adaptability raises uncertainties concerning the run-time product quality or dependability,…
The characterization of plasticity, robustness, and evolvability, an important issue in biology, is studied in terms of phenotypic fluctuations. By numerically evolving gene regulatory networks, the proportionality between the phenotypic…
Mutation testing is a standard technique to evaluate the quality of a test suite. Due to its computationally intensive nature, many approaches have been proposed to make this technique feasible in real case scenarios. Among these…
A fundamental challenge of software testing is the statistically well-grounded extrapolation from program behaviors observed during testing. For instance, a security researcher who has run the fuzzer for a week has currently no means (i) to…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
Providing high quality software and evaluating the software reliability in softwarized networks are crucial for vendors and customers. These networks rely on open source code, which are sensitive to contain high number of bugs. Both, the…
The interaction between natural selection and random mutation is frequently debated in recent years. Does similar dilemma also exist in the evolution of real networks such as biological networks? In this paper, we try to discuss this issue…
The predictability of program execution provides attackers a rich source of knowledge who can exploit it to spy or remotely control the program. Moving target defense addresses this issue by constantly switching between many diverse…
Neutral evolution assumes that there are no selective forces distinguishing different variants in a population. Despite this striking assumption, many recent studies have sought to assess whether neutrality can provide a good description of…
Software Engineering is a constantly evolving subject area that faces new challenges every day as it tries to automate newer business processes. One of the key challenges to the success of a software solution is attaining sustainability.…
Software reliability is an important quality attrib-ute, often evaluated as either a function of time or of system structures. The goal of this study is to have this metric cover both for component-based software, be-cause its reliability…
Mutation has traditionally been regarded as an important operator in evolutionary algorithms. In particular, there have been many experimental studies which showed the effectiveness of adapting mutation rates for various static optimization…
Our societies are increasingly dependent on services supplied by computers & their software. New technology only exacerbates this dependence by increasing the number, performance, and degree of autonomy and inter-connectivity of…