Threats to the validity of mutation-based test assessment

in International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2016 (2016)

Assessing and Improving the Mutation Testing Practice of PIT

E-print/Working paper (2015)

Sound and Quasi-Complete Detection of Infeasible Test Requirements

in 8th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST'15) (2015)

Similarity testing for access control

in Information and Software Technology (2015), 58

Context: Access control is among the most important security mechanisms, and XACML is the de facto standard for specifying, storing and deploying access control policies. Since it is critical that ... [more ▼]

Context: Access control is among the most important security mechanisms, and XACML is the de facto standard for specifying, storing and deploying access control policies. Since it is critical that enforced policies are correct, policy testing must be performed in an effective way to identify potential security flaws and bugs. In practice, exhaustive testing is impossible due to budget constraints. Therefore the tests need to be prioritized so that resources are focused on their most relevant subset. Objective: This paper tackles the issue of access control test prioritization. It proposes a new approach for access control test prioritization that relies on similarity. Method: The approach has been applied to several policies and the results have been compared to random prioritization (as a baseline). To assess the different prioritization criteria, we use mutation analysis and compute the mutation scores reached by each criterion. This helps assessing the rate of fault detection. Results: The empirical results indicate that our proposed approach is effective and its rate of fault detection is higher than that of random prioritization. Conclusion: We conclude that prioritization of access control test cases can be usefully based on similarity criteria. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. [less ▲]

Combining Multi-Objective Search and Constraint Solving for Configuring Large Software Product Lines

in 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015) (2015)

Mitigating the Effects of Equivalent Mutants with Mutant Classification Strategies

in Science of Computer Programming (2014), 95

Mutation Testing has been shown to be a powerful technique in detecting software faults. Despite this advantage, in practice there is a need to deal with the equivalent mutants’ problem. Automatically ... [more ▼]

Mutation Testing has been shown to be a powerful technique in detecting software faults. Despite this advantage, in practice there is a need to deal with the equivalent mutants’ problem. Automatically detecting equivalent mutants is an undecidable problem. Therefore, identifying equivalent mutants is cumbersome since it requires manual analysis, resulting in unbearable testing cost. To overcome this difficulty, researchers suggested the use of mutant classification, an approach that aims at isolating equivalent mutants automatically. From this perspective, the present paper establishes and empirically assesses possible mutant classification strategies. A conducted study reveals that mutant classification isolates equivalent mutants effectively when low quality test suites are used. However, it turns out that as the test suites evolve, the benefit of this practice is reduced. Thus, mutant classification is only fruitful in improving test suites of low quality and only up to a certain limit. To this end, empirical results show that the proposed strategies provide a cost-effective solution when they consider a small number of live mutants, i.e., 10-12. At this point they kill 92% of all the killable mutants. [less ▲]

MutaLog: a Tool for Mutating Logic Formulas

in Testing Tools Track, 7th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2014) (2014)

Towards a Language-Independent Approach for Reverse-Engineering of Software Product Lines

in 29th Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2014) (2014)

A Variability Perspective of Mutation Analysis

in Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2014) (2014)

Bypassing the Combinatorial Explosion: Using Similarity to Generate and Prioritize T-wise Test Configurations for Software Product Lines

in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2014), 40(7), 650-670