On the Energy Footprint of Mobile Testing Frameworks

High energy consumption is a challenging issue that an ever increasing number of mobile applications face today. However, energy consumption is being tested in an ad hoc way, despite being an important non-functional requirement of an application. Such limitation becomes particularly disconcerting during software testing: on the one hand,...

Fixing vulnerabilities potentially hinders maintainability

Security is a requirement of utmost importance to produce high-quality software. However, there is still a considerable amount of vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed almost weekly. We hypothesize that developers affect the maintainability of their codebases when patching vulnerabilities. This paper evaluates the impact of patches to...

A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Program Spectra Diagnosability

Current metrics for assessing the adequacy of a test-suite plainly focus on the number of components (be it lines, branches, paths) covered by the suite, but do not explicitly check how the tests actually exercise these components and whether they provide enough information so that spectrum-based fault localization techniques can perform...

A Test-suite Diagnosability Metric for Spectrum-based Fault Localization Approaches

Current metrics for assessing the adequacy of a test- suite plainly focus on the number of components (be it lines, branches, paths) covered by the suite, but do not explicitly check how the tests actually exercise these components and whether they provide enough information so that spectrum-based fault localization techniques can perform...

Revisiting the Practical Use of Automated Software Fault Localization Techniques

In the last two decades, a great amount of effort has been put in researching automated debugging techniques to support developers in the debugging process. However, in a widely cited user study published in 2011, Parnin and Orso found that research in automated debugging techniques made assumptions that do not hold in practice, and suggested...

The construction industry and the challenges of the millennium development goals

It has long been recognised that the role of the construction industry in socio-economic development goes beyond its share in national output. A number of studies have focused on the issue of employment creation others have emphasised its multiplier effect on other sectors of the economy. The role of construction infrastructure in the process of...

Improving the software fault localization process through testability information

When failures occur during software testing, automated software fault localization helps to diagnose their root causes and identify the defective components of a program to support debugging. Diagnosis is carried out by selecting test cases in such way that their pass or fail information will narrow down the set of fault candidates, and,...

A diagnostic approach to test priorization

In development processes with high code production rates testing typically triggers fault diagnosis to localize the detected failures. However, current test prioritization algorithms are tuned for failure detection rate rather than diagnostic information. Consequently, unnecessary diagnostic effort might be spent to localize the faults. We...

Spectrum-based Fault Localization in Embedded Software

Locating software components that are responsible for observed failures is a time-intensive and expensive phase in the software development cycle. Automatic fault localization techniques aid developers/testers in pinpointing the root cause of software failures, as such reducing the debugging effort. Automatic fault localization has been an...

Techniques for Diagnosing Software Faults

This technical report is meant to report our findings and ideas with respect to spectrum-based fault localization and modelbased diagnosis. In the following we want to introduce and compare model-based diagnosis (MBD), spectrum-based fault localization (SFL) and our contributions using 3-inverters as a running example (which is simple, yet...

On the Performance of Fault Screeners in Software Development and Deployment

Preprint of paper published in: ENASE 2008 - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering, 4-7 May 2008 Fault screeners are simple software (or hardware) constructs that detect variable value errors based on unary invariant checking. In this paper we evaluate and compare the...

Diagnosing Intermittent Faults

In this working report we outline how to determine the intermittency parameters gj from the activity matrix A (context: DX’08 paper Abreu, Zoeteweij, Van Gemund). We start with the single fault (SF) case and show that averaging over the error vector e is the exact way. We also show that in this way the probability of obtaining exactly this e...

Program spectra analysis in embedded software: A case study

Because of constraints imposed by the market, embedded software in consumer electronics is almost inevitably shipped with faults and the goal is just to reduce the inherent unreliability to an acceptable level before a product has to be released. Automatic fault diagnosis is a valuable tool to capture software faults without extra effort spent...