Related papers: Latent Mutants: A large-scale study on the Interpl…
We propose a new, flexible approach for dynamically maintaining successful mutation rates in evolutionary algorithms using $k$-bit flip mutations. The algorithm adds successful mutation rates to an archive of promising rates that are…
Many academic studies in the field of software testing rely on mutation testing to use as their comparison criteria. However, recent studies have shown that redundant mutants have a significant effect on the accuracy of their results. One…
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,…
Facts are subject to contingencies and can be true or false in different circumstances. One such contingency is time, wherein some facts mutate over a given period, e.g., the president of a country or the winner of a championship.…
The forest of mutations associated to a multitype branching forest is obtained by merging together all vertices of its clusters and by preserving connections between them. We first show that the forest of mutations of any mulitype branching…
A recent study applied frequentist survival analysis methods to a subset of the Software Heritage Graph and determined which attributes of an OSS project contribute to its health. This paper serves as an exact replication of that study. In…
During software evolution, inexperienced developers may introduce design anti-patterns when they modify their software systems to fix bugs or to add new functionalities based on changes in requirements. Developers may also use design…
Software security mainly studies vulnerability detection: is my code vulnerable today? This hinders risk estimation, so new approaches are emerging to forecast the occurrence of future vulnerabilities. While useful, these approaches are…
Background: Test flakiness is identified as a major issue that compromises the regression testing process of complex software systems. Flaky tests manifest non-deterministic behaviour, send confusing signals to developers, and break their…
In mutation testing the question whether a mutant is equivalent to its program is important in order to compute the correct mutation score. Unfortunately, answering this question is not always possible and can hardly be obtained just by…
Python's dynamic nature complicates testing and increases the possibility that some defects evade detection, so an effective fault prediction becomes essential. We examine whether post-release faults can be predicted using modern ML and DL.…
A loop invariant is a property of a loop that remains true before and after each execution of the loop. The identification of loop invariants is a critical step to support automated program safety assessment. Recent advancements in Large…
A mutator is an allele that increases the mutation rate throughout the genome by disrupting some aspect of DNA replication or repair. Mutators that increase the mutation rate by the order of 100 fold have been observed to spontaneously…
We introduce and study the mutating contact process, a variant of the multitype contact process, where one type mutates at a constant rate to the other type. We prove that on $\mathbb{Z}$ a single mutant cannot survive while on…
Modern programming languages (e.g., Java and C#) provide features to separate error-handling code from regular code, seeking to enhance software comprehensibility and maintainability. Nevertheless, the way exception handling (EH) code is…
The Luria-Delbr{\"u}ck experiment is a cornerstone of evolutionary theory, demonstrating the randomness of mutations before selection. The distribution of the number of mutants in this experiment has been the subject of intense…
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…
Understanding if and how mutants reach fixation in populations is an important question in evolutionary biology. We study the impact of population growth has on the success of mutants. To systematically understand the effects of growth we…
We study a general setting of neutral evolution in which the population is of finite, constant size and can have spatial structure. Mutation leads to different genetic types ("traits"), which can be discrete or continuous. Under minimal…