Related papers: Do Null-Type Mutation Operators Help Prevent Null-…

Parser generators generate translators from language specifications. In many cases, such specifications contain semantic actions written in the same language as the generated code. Since these actions are subject to little static checking,…

Mutation testing has been demonstrated to be one of the most powerful fault-revealing tools in the tester's tool kit. Much previous work implicitly assumed it to be sufficient to re-compute mutant suites per release. Sadly, this makes…

Understanding how software defects manifest and evolve in production environments is critical for improving reliability. While previous research has largely focused on pre-release defects, the nature of residual faults, i.e., those escaping…

In verification-aware languages, such as Dafny, despite their critical role, specifications are as prone to error as implementations. Flaws in specifications can result in formally verified programs that deviate from the intended behavior.…

Code cloning is not only assumed to inflate maintenance costs but also considered defect-prone as inconsistent changes to code duplicates can lead to unexpected behavior. Consequently, the identification of duplicated code, clone detection,…

In software testing, a set of test cases is constructed according to some predefined selection criteria. The software is then examined against these test cases. Three interesting observations have been made on the current artifacts of…

Null pointer exceptions, also known as null dereferences are the number one exceptions in the field. In this paper, we propose 9 alternative execution semantics when a null pointer exception is about to happen. We implement those…

Software vulnerabilities are now reported at an unprecedented speed due to the recent development of automated vulnerability hunting tools. However, fixing vulnerabilities still mainly depends on programmers' manual efforts. Developers need…

Despite being an old language feature, Java exception handling code is one of the least understood parts of many systems. Several studies have analyzed the characteristics of exception handling code, trying to identify common practices or…

Open-source software supply chain security relies heavily on assessing affected versions of library vulnerabilities. While prior studies have leveraged exploits for verifying vulnerability affected versions, they point out a key limitation…

Model-based mutation analysis is a recent research area, and real-time system testing can benefit from using model mutants. Model-based mutation testing (MBMT) is a particular branch of model-based testing. It generates faulty versions of a…

Software testing is one of the very important Quality Assurance (QA) components. A lot of researchers deal with the testing process in terms of tester motivation and how tests should or should not be written. However, it is not known from…

Mutation testing can be used to assess the fault-detection capabilities of a given test suite. To this aim, two characteristics of mutation testing frameworks are of paramount importance: (i) they should generate mutants that are…

Due to increasingly complex software design and rapid iterative development, code defects and security vulnerabilities are prevalent in modern software. In response, programmers rely on static analysis tools to regularly scan their…

Smart contracts are immutable, verifiable, and autonomous pieces of code that can be deployed and ran on blockchain networks like Ethereum. Due to the immutability nature of blockchain, no change is possible on a deployed smart contract or…

Fault based testing is a technique in which test cases are chosen to reveal certain classes of faults. At present, testing professionals use their personal experience to select testing methods for fault classes considered the most likely to…

During compilation from Java source code to bytecode, some information is irreversibly lost. In other words, compilation and decompilation of Java code is not symmetric. Consequently, the decompilation process, which aims at producing…

In this paper, we describe and present the first dataset of source code plagiarism specifically aimed at contest plagiarism. The dataset contains 251 pairs of plagiarized solutions of competitive programming tasks in Java, as well as 660…

Mutation is one of the most important stages of the genetic algorithm because of its impact on the exploration of global optima, and to overcome premature convergence. There are many types of mutation, and the problem lies in selection of…

We propose NOPOL, an approach to automatic repair of buggy conditional statements (i.e., if-then-else statements). This approach takes a buggy program as well as a test suite as input and generates a patch with a conditional expression as…