Related papers: Mutation Testing in Evolving Systems: Studying the…

The competent programmer hypothesis states that most programmers are competent enough to create correct or almost correct source code. Because this implies that bugs should usually manifest through small variations of the correct code, the…

Concurrent programs are difficult to test due to their inherent non-determinism. To address this problem, testing often requires the exploration of thread schedules of a program; this can be time-consuming when applied to real-world…

The relevance of code comprehension in a developer's daily work was recognized more than 40 years ago. Consequently, many experiments were conducted to find out how developers could be supported during code comprehension and which code…

GitHub commits, which record the code changes with natural language messages for description, play a critical role for software developers to comprehend the software evolution. To promote the development of the open-source software…

Deep Learning (DL) frameworks are a fundamental component of DL development. Therefore, the detection of DL framework defects is important and challenging. As one of the most widely adopted DL testing techniques, model mutation has recently…

Much research on software testing makes an implicit assumption that test failures are deterministic such that they always witness the presence of the same defects. However, this assumption is not always true because some test failures are…

Context: Many studies consider the relation between individual aspects of the software engineering process and bug-introduction, e.g., software testing and code review. These studies typically only identify correlations between their set of…

Testability is the probability whether tests will detect a fault, given that a fault in the program exists. How efficiently the faults will be uncovered depends upon the testability of the software. Various researchers have proposed…

Metamorphic testing is a widely used methodology that examines an expected relation between pairs of executions to automatically find bugs, such as correctness bugs. We found that code coverage cannot accurately measure the extent to which…

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…

Source code is changed for a reason, e.g., to adapt, correct, or adapt it. This reason can provide valuable insight into the development process but is rarely explicitly documented when the change is committed to a source code repository.…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

Context: Automated fault localisation aims to assist developers in the task of identifying the root cause of the fault by narrowing down the space of likely fault locations. Simulating variants of the faulty program called mutants, several…

Background: Code cloning - copying and reusing pieces of source code - is a common phenomenon in software development in practice. There have been several empirical studies on the effects of cloning, but there are contradictory results…

Quantum computing is rapidly advancing, but quantum software development faces significant challenges, including a steep learning curve, high hardware error rates, and a lack of mature engineering practices. This study conducts a…

Mutation rate is a key determinant of the pace as well as outcome of evolution, and variability in this rate has been shown in different scenarios to play a key role in evolutionary adaptation and resistance evolution under stress caused by…

With machine learning models being increasingly used to aid decision making even in high-stakes domains, there has been a growing interest in developing interpretable models. Although many supposedly interpretable models have been proposed,…

With software system complexity leading to the rise of software defects, research efforts have been done on techniques towards predicting software defects and Just-in-time (JIT) defect prediction which predicts whether a code change is…

This paper describes Mull, an open-source tool for mutation testing based on the LLVM framework. Mull works with LLVM IR, a low-level intermediate representation, to perform mutations, and uses LLVM JIT for just-in-time compilation. This…

Cooperation is ubiquitous across all levels of biological systems ranging from microbial communities to human societies. It, however, seemingly contradicts the evolutionary theory, since cooperators are exploited by free-riders and thus are…