Liveness Checking of the HotStuff Protocol Family

Byzantine consensus protocols aim at maintaining safety guarantees under any network synchrony model and at providing liveness in partially or fully synchronous networks. However, several Byzantine consensus protocols have been shown to violate liveness properties under certain scenarios. Existing testing methods for checking the liveness of...

Probabilistic Concurrency Testing for Weak Memory Programs

The Probabilistic Concurrency Testing (PCT) algorithm that provides theoretical guarantees on the probability of detecting concurrency bugs does not apply to weak memory programs. The PCT algorithm builds on the interleaving semantics of sequential consistency, which does not hold for weak memory concurrency. It is because weak memory...

Exploring an On-Chip Sensor to Detect Unique Faults in RRAMs

Memristive devices have become promising candidates to complement and/or replace the CMOS technology, due to their CMOS manufacturing process compatibility, zero standby power consumption, high scalability, as well as their capability to implement high-density memories and new computing paradigms. Despite these advantages, memristive devices are...

Untestable faults identification in GPGPUs for safety-critical applications

Nowadays, General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) devices are considered as promising solutions for high-performance safety-critical applications, such as those in the automotive field. However, their adoption requires solutions to effectively detect faults arising in the device during the operative life. Hence, effective in-field...

Spreadsheet testing in practice

Despite being popular end-user tools, spreadsheets suffer from the vulnerability of error-proneness. In software engineering, testing has been proposed as a way to address errors. It is important therefore to know whether spreadsheet users also test, or how do they test and to what extent, especially since most spreadsheet users do not have...

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...

TravisTorrent: Synthesizing Travis CI and GitHub for Full-Stack Research on Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) has become a best practice of modern software development. Thanks in part to its tight integration with GitHub, Travis CI has emerged as arguably the most widely used CI platform for Open-Source Software (OSS) development. However, despite its prominent role in Software Engineering in practice, the benefits, costs,...

Oops, My Tests Broke the Build: An Explorative Analysis of Travis CI with GitHub

AbContinuous Integration (CI) has become a best practice of modern software development. Yet, at present, we have a shortfall of insight into the testing practices that are common in CI-based software development. In particular, we<br/>seek quantifiable evidence on how central testing is to the CI process, how strongly the project language...

To Mock or Not To Mock?: An Empirical Study on Mocking Practices

When writing automated unit tests, developers often deal with software artifacts that have several dependencies. In these cases, one has the possibility of either instantiating the dependencies or using mock objects to simulate the dependencies' expected behavior. Even though recent quantitative studies showed that mock objects are widely used...

Insulation Reliability of Superconductive Cables

High current capability, good integration in urban area and zero external magnetic field are advantages of HTS cables that make them interesting for implementation in the Netherlands. So far experience with HTS cable projects is good, but still limited. Yet there is a need for a proper testing practice. Due to limited operational experience,...

A scalable infrastructure for teaching concepts of programming languages in Scala with WebLab: An experience report

In this paper, we report on our experience in teaching a course on concepts of programming languages at TU Delft based on Krishnamurthi's PAPL book with the definitional interpreter approach using Scala as meta-language and using the WebLab learning management system. In particular, we discuss our experience with encoding of definitional...

Continuous Delivery Practices in a Large Financial Organization

Continuous Delivery is an agile software develop- ment practice in which developers frequently integrate changes into the main development line and produce releases of their software. An automated Continuous Integration infrastructure builds and tests these changes. Claimed advantages of CD include early discovery of (integration) errors,...

When, How, and Why Developers (Do Not) Test in Their IDEs

The research community in Software Engineering and Software Testing in particular builds many of its contributions on a set of mutually shared expectations. Despite the fact that they form the basis of many publications as well as open-source and commercial testing applications, these common expectations and beliefs are rarely ever questioned....

How (Much) Do Developers Test?

What do we know about software testing in the real world? It seems we know from Fred Brooks’ seminal work “The Mythical Man-Month” that 50% of project effort is spent on testing. However, due to the enormous advances in software engineering in the past 40 years, the question stands: Is this observation still true? In fact, was it ever true? The...