Related papers: Does mutation testing improve testing practices?

Mutation testing is a technique to assess the effectiveness of test suites by introducing artificial faults into programs. Although mutation testing plugins are available for many platforms and languages, none is currently available for…

There is an increasing amount of research and commercial tools for automated test case generation using Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper critically examines whether recent LLM-based test generation tools, such as Codium CoverAgent…

Static bug detection tools help developers detect problems in the code, including bad programming practices and potential defects. Recent efforts to integrate static bug detectors in modern software development workflows, such as in code…

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…

Automatic test generation aims to save developers time and effort by producing test suites with reasonably high coverage and fault detection. However, the focus of search-based generation tools in maximizing coverage leaves other…

Automatic testing is a widely adopted technique for improving software quality. Software developers add, remove and update test methods and test classes as part of the software development process as well as during the evolution phase,…

The null-type is a major source of faults in Java programs, and its overuse has a severe impact on software maintenance. Unfortunately traditional mutation testing operators do not cover null-type faults by default, hence cannot be used as…

Accurately predicting faulty software units helps practitioners target faulty units and prioritize their efforts to maintain software quality. Prior studies use machine-learning models to detect faulty software code. We revisit past studies…

Smart contract is a special program that manages digital assets on blockchain. It is difficult to recover the loss if users make transactions through buggy smart contracts, which cannot be directly fixed. Hence, it is important to ensure…

Security is a requirement of utmost importance to produce high-quality software. However, there is still a considerable amount of vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed almost weekly. We hypothesize that developers affect the…

Context: Test-driven development (TDD) is an agile software development approach that has been widely claimed to improve software quality. However, the extent to which TDD improves quality appears to be largely dependent upon the…

Software bugs pose an ever-present concern for developers, and patching such bugs requires a considerable amount of costs through complex operations. In contrast, introducing bugs can be an effortless job, in that even a simple mutation can…

Software testing is an important phase in the software development life-cycle because it helps in identifying bugs in a software system before it is shipped into the hand of its end users. There are numerous studies on how developers test…

Smart Contracts are software programs that are deployed and executed within a blockchain infrastructure. Due to their immutable nature, directly resulting from the specific characteristics of the deploying infrastructure, smart contracts…

Developers are increasingly using services such as Dependabot to automate dependency updates. However, recent research has shown that developers perceive such services as unreliable, as they heavily rely on test coverage to detect conflicts…

High-quality software products rely on both well-written source code and timely detection and thorough reporting of bugs. However, some programmers view bug reports as negative assessments of their work, leading them to withhold reporting…

Mock assertions provide developers with a powerful means to validate program behaviors that are unobservable to test assertions. Despite their significance, they are rarely considered by automated test generation techniques. Effective…

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are integral parts of software systems that require interactions from their users. Software testers have paid special attention to GUI testing in the last decade, and have devised techniques that are…

When permutation methods are used in practice, often a limited number of random permutations are used to decrease the computational burden. However, most theoretical literature assumes that the whole permutation group is used, and methods…

Nowadays, we are witnessing a wide adoption of Machine learning (ML) models in many safety-critical systems, thanks to recent breakthroughs in deep learning and reinforcement learning. Many people are now interacting with systems based on…