Related papers: Testing by Dualization
Software testing is a critical element of software quality assurance and represents the ultimate review of specification, design and coding. Software testing is the process of testing the functionality and correctness of software by running…
Software testing is a prime factor in software industry. Besides knowing the importance of testing, only limited time is allocated for teaching it. It will be more efficient if testing is taught simultaneously with programming foundations.…
Program specialization is a program transformation methodology which improves program efficiency by exploiting the information about the input data which are available at compile time. We show that current techniques for program…
Software testing is a complex, intellectual activity based (at least) on analysis, reasoning, decision making, abstraction and collaboration performed in a highly demanding environment. Naturally, it uses and allocates multiple cognitive…
Intelligent coding systems are transforming software development by enabling users to specify code behavior in natural language. However, the opaque decision-making of AI-driven coders raises trust and usability concerns, particularly for…
This paper proposes new semantics for nondeterministic program execution, replacing the standard relational semantics for propositional dynamic logic (PDL). Under these new semantics, program execution is represented as fundamentally…
Search-based Software Testing (SBST) can automatically generate test cases to search for requirements violations. Unlike manual test case development, it can generate a substantial number of test cases in a limited time. However, SBST does…
In this article we address the problem of automatic answer checking in interactive learning systems that support mathematical notation. This problem consists of the problem of establishing identities in formal mathematical systems and hence…
Software engineering concepts and processes are worthy of formal study; and yet we seldom formalize them. This "research ideas" article explores what a theory of software engineering could and should look like. Software engineering research…
There has been a recent explosion of research on Large Language Models (LLMs) for software engineering tasks, in particular code generation. However, results from LLMs can be highly unstable; nondeterministically returning very different…
Nondeterministic choice is a useful program construct that provides a way to describe the behaviour of a program without specifying the details of possible implementations. It supports the stepwise refinement of programs, a method that has…
Parallelism is often required for performance. In these situations an excess of non-determinism is harmful as it means the program can have several different behaviours or even different results. Even in domains such as high-performance…
The problem of mechanically formalizing and proving metatheoretic properties of programming language calculi, type systems, operational semantics, and related formal systems has received considerable attention recently. However, the dual…
Sequence-based specification and usage-driven statistical testing are designed for rigorous and cost-effective software development, offering a semi-formal approach to assessing the behavior of complex systems and interactions between…
For software interacting directly with real-world end-users, it is common practice to script scenario tests validating the system's compliance with a number of its features. However, these do not accommodate the replication of the type of…
This note concerns a search for publications in which the pragmatic concept of a test as conducted in the practice of software testing is formalized, a theory about software testing based on such a formalization is presented or it is…
Test or prove? These two approaches to software verification have long been presented as opposites. One is dynamic, the other static: a test executes the program, a proof only analyzes the program text. A different perspective is emerging,…
Conversational AI systems combine AI-based solutions with the flexibility of conversational interfaces. However, most existing testing solutions do not straightforwardly adapt to the characteristics of conversational interaction or to the…
We explore language semantics for automata combining probabilistic and nondeterministic behavior. We first show that there are precisely two natural semantics for probabilistic automata with nondeterminism. For both choices, we show that…
Context. Multiple automated techniques have been proposed and developed for mobile application GUI testing aiming to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and practicality. The effectiveness, efficiency, and practicality are 3 fundamental…