Related papers: Keeping Mutation Test Suites Consistent and Releva…

Mutation testing is an established fault-based testing technique. It operates by seeding faults into the programs under test and asking developers to write tests that reveal these faults. These tests have the potential to reveal a large…

Mutation testing may be used to guide test case generation and as a technique to assess the quality of test suites. Despite being used frequently, mutation testing is not so commonly applied in the mobile world. One critical challenge in…

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…

Library dependencies in software ecosystems play a crucial role in the development of software. As newer releases of these libraries are published, developers may opt to pin their dependencies to a particular version. While pinning may have…

Context: Mining software repositories is a popular means to gain insights into a software project's evolution, monitor project health, support decisions and derive best practices. Tools supporting the mining process are commonly applied by…

Simulation modelling systems are routinely used to test or understand real-world scenarios in a controlled setting. They have found numerous applications in scientific research, engineering, and industrial operations. Due to their complex…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been used to generate mutants in both research work and in industrial practice. However, there has been no comprehensive empirical study of their performance for this increasingly important…

Evaluating Software testability can assist software managers in optimizing testing budgets and identifying opportunities for refactoring. In this paper, we abandon the traditional approach of pursuing testability measurements based on the…

During the software lifecycle, a program can evolve several times for different reasons such as the optimisation of a bottle-neck, the refactoring of an obscure function, etc. These code changes often involve several functions or modules,…

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…

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…

An extreme transformation removes the body of a method that is reached by one test case at least. If the test suite passes on the original program and still passes after the extreme transformation, the transformation is said to be…

Information Retrieval (IR) systems are exposed to constant changes in most components. Documents are created, updated, or deleted, the information needs are changing, and even relevance might not be static. While it is generally expected…

Many software engineering techniques, such as fault localization, operate based on relevance relationships between tests and code. These relationships are often inferred through the use of dynamic test execution information (test execution…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software applications. Downstream application developers often access LLMs through APIs provided as a service. However, LLM APIs are often updated silently and scheduled to be…

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…

Contrast set consistency is a robustness measurement that evaluates the rate at which a model correctly responds to all instances in a bundle of minimally different examples relying on the same knowledge. To draw additional insights, we…

Large Language Models (LLMs) changed the way we design and interact with software systems. Their ability to process and extract information from text has drastically improved productivity in a number of routine tasks. Developers that want…

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 testing is the important phase of software development process. But, this phase can be easily missed by software developers because of their limited time to complete the project. Since, software developers finish their software…