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Related papers: Killing Stubborn Mutants with Symbolic Execution

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Mutation analysis has many applications, such as assessing the quality of test cases, fault localization, test input generation, security analysis, etc. Such applications involve running test suite against a large number of program mutants…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Ali Ghanbari , Andrian Marcus

Mutation testing is an effective approach to evaluate and strengthen software test suites, but its adoption is currently limited by the mutants' execution computational cost. Several strategies have been proposed to reduce this cost (a.k.a.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-15 Giovani Guizzo , Federica Sarro , Jens Krinke , Silvia Regina Vergilio

Symbolic execution is a classic technique for systematic bug finding, which has seen many applications in recent years but remains hard to scale. Recent work introduced ranged symbolic execution to distribute the symbolic execution task…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Shikhar Singh , Sarfraz Khurshid

Rapid adoptions of Deep Learning (DL) in a broad range of fields led to the development of specialised testing techniques for DL systems, including DL mutation testing. However, existing post-training DL mutation techniques often generate…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Jinhan Kim , Nargiz Humbatova , Gunel Jahangirova , Shin Yoo , Paolo Tonella

Symbolic execution is an effective path oriented and constraint based program analysis technique. Recently, there is a significant development in the research and application of symbolic execution. However, symbolic execution still suffers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Yufeng Zhang , Zhenbang Chen , Ji Wang

Mutation testing research has indicated that a major part of its application cost is due to the large number of low utility mutants that it introduces. Although previous research has identified this issue, no previous study has proposed any…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-02 Aayush Garg , Milos Ojdanic , Renzo Degiovanni , Thierry Titcheu Chekam , Mike Papadakis , Yves Le Traon

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Florian Tambon , Foutse Khomh , Giuliano Antoniol

We describe a technique for systematic testing of multi-threaded programs. We combine Quasi-Optimal Partial-Order Reduction, a state-of-the-art technique that tackles path explosion due to interleaving non-determinism, with symbolic…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Daniel Schemmel , Julian Büning , César Rodríguez , David Laprell , Klaus Wehrle

Mutation analysis can provide valuable insights into both System Under Test (SUT) and its test suite. However, it is not scalable due to the cost of building and testing a large number of mutants. Predictive Mutation Testing (PMT) has been…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-15 Jinhan Kim , Juyoung Jeon , Shin Hong , Shin Yoo

Symbolic execution has shown its ability to find security-relevant flaws in software, but faces significant scalability challenges. There is a commonly held belief that manual intervention by an expert can help alleviate these limiting…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-05-10 John Galea , Sean Heelan , Daniel Neville , Daniel Kroening

Symbolic execution helps check programs by exploring different paths based on symbolic inputs. Tools like KLEE are commonly used because they can automatically detect bugs and create test cases. But one of KLEE's biggest issues is how slow…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Rong Feng , Vanisha Gupta , Vivek Patel , Viroopaksh Reddy Ernampati , Suman Saha

Mutation testing was proposed to identify weaknesses in test suites by repeatedly generating artificially faulty versions of the software (mutants) and determining if the test suite is sufficient to detect them (kill them). When the tests…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Hang Du , Vijay Krishna Palepu , James A. Jones

Mutants support testing and debugging in two roles: (i) as test goals and (ii) as substitutes for real faults. Hard-to-kill mutants provide better guidance for test improvement, while realism is essential when mutants are used to simulate…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Zaheed Ahmed , Emmanuel Charleson Dapaah , Philip Makedonski , Jens Grabowski

While the capabilities of generative foundational models have advanced rapidly in recent years, methods to prevent harmful and unsafe behaviors remain underdeveloped. Among the pressing challenges in AI safety, machine unlearning (MU) has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Marcin Sendera , Łukasz Struski , Kamil Książek , Kryspin Musiol , Jacek Tabor , Dawid Rymarczyk

Mutation testing has emerged as a powerful technique for evaluating the effectiveness of test suites for Deep Neural Networks. Among existing approaches, the statistical mutant killing criterion of DeepCrime has leveraged statistical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Jinhan Kim , Nargiz Humbatova , Gunel Jahangirova , Shin Yoo , Paolo Tonella

We propose a symbolic execution method for analyzing the safety of software under fault attacks both accurately and efficiently. Fault attacks leverage physically injected hardware faults in an embedded system to break the safety of a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Yuzhou Fang , Chenyu Zhou , Jingbo Wang , Chao Wang

Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) is an important method for the testing of programs. An important system on DSE is KLEE which inputs a C/C++ program annotated with symbolic variables, compiles it into LLVM, and then emulates the execution…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Joxan Jaffar , Rasool Maghareh , Sangharatna Godboley , Xuan-Linh Ha

Mutation testing is an effective but time consuming method for gauging the quality of a test suite. It functions by repeatedly making changes, called mutants, to the source code and checking whether the test suite fails (i.e., whether the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-09-13 Serena Chen

Mutation analysis is a powerful technique for assessing test-suite adequacy, yet conventional approaches suffer from generating redundant, equivalent, or non-executable mutants. These challenges are particularly amplified in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Pablo Valle , Shaukat Ali , Aitor Arrieta

Dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) provides a precise means to analyze programs and it can be used to generate test cases and to detect a variety of bugs including memory vulnerabilities. However, the path explosion problem may prevent a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Tuba Yavuz
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