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Some test amplification tools extend a manually created test suite with additional test cases to increase the code coverage. The technique is effective, in the sense that it suggests strong and understandable test cases, generally adopted…

The closure and the partitioning principles have been used to build various multiple testing procedures in the past three decades. The essence of these two principles is based on parameter space partitioning. In this article, we propose a…

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,…

Machine learning has become prevalent across a wide variety of applications. Unfortunately, machine learning has also shown to be susceptible to deception, leading to errors, and even fatal failures. This circumstance calls into question…

While leveraging LLMs to automatically generate SystemVerilog assertions (SVAs) from natural language specifications holds great potential, existing techniques face a key challenge: LLMs often lack sufficient understanding of IC design,…

Spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) works well for single-fault programs but its accuracy decays for increasing fault numbers. We present FLITSR (Fault Localization by Iterative Test Suite Reduction), a novel SBFL extension that…

Various proxy metrics for test quality have been defined in order to guide developers when writing tests. Code coverage is particularly well established in practice, even though the question of how coverage relates to test quality is a…

Functional verification has become the most time-consuming phase in IC development, and Assertion-Based Verification (ABV) is key to reducing debugging time. However, existing LLM-based assertion generation methods typically pursue…

The use of asserts in code has received increasing attention in the software engineering community in the past few years, even though it has been a recognized programming construct for many decades. A previous empirical study by Casalnuovo…

Sequential hypothesis testing asks for decision rules that update as data arrive. A natural goal is \emph{eventual correctness}: the rule may change its mind early on, but it should make only finitely many wrong decisions almost surely.…

In reinforcement learning, a decision needs to be made at some point as to whether it is worthwhile to carry on with the learning process or to terminate it. In many such situations, stochastic elements are often present which govern the…

A classical heuristic in software testing is to reward diversity, which implies that a higher priority must be assigned to test cases that differ the most from those already prioritized. This approach is commonly known as similarity-based…

Automatic test generation plays a critical role in software quality assurance. While the recent advances in Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating useful tests, these…

Unit tests often lack concise summaries that convey test intent, especially in auto-generated or poorly documented codebases. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution, but their effectiveness depends heavily on how they are…

Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques typically exploit spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) to identify the program locations that should be patched, making the effectiveness of APR techniques dependent on the effectiveness of…

Identifying the cause of a proof failure during deductive verification of programs is hard: it may be due to an incorrectness in the program, an incompleteness in the program annotations, or an incompleteness of the prover. The changes…

In this work, we consider the fundamental problem of deriving quantitative bounds on the probability that a given assertion is violated in a probabilistic program. We provide automated algorithms that obtain both lower and upper bounds on…

SystemVerilog Assertions (SVAs) are essential for verifying Register Transfer Level (RTL) designs, as they can be embedded into key functional paths to detect unintended behaviours. During simulation, assertion failures occur when the…

Specification inference techniques aim at (automatically) inferring a set of assertions that capture the exhibited software behaviour by generating and filtering assertions through dynamic test executions and mutation testing. Although…

Mutation testing is a means to assess the effectiveness of a test suite and its outcome is considered more meaningful than code coverage metrics. However, despite several optimizations, mutation testing requires a significant computational…