Basic block coverage for search-based unit testing and crash reproduction

Search-based techniques have been widely used for white-box test generation. Many of these approaches rely on the approach level and branch distance heuristics to guide the search process and generate test cases with high line and branch coverage. Despite the positive results achieved by these two heuristics, they only use the information...

Carving Information Sources to Drive Search-Based Crash Reproduction and Test Case Generation

Software testing is one of the essential and expensive tasks in software development. Hence, many approaches were introduced to automate different software testing tasks. Among these techniques, search-based test generation techniques have been vastly applied in real-world cases and have shown promising results. These strategies apply search...

Summary of Search-based Crash Reproduction using Behavioral Model Seeding

This is an extended abstract of the article: Pouria Derakhshanfar, Xavier Devroey, Gilles Perrouin, Andy Zaidman and Arie van Deursen. 2019. Search-based crash reproduction using behavioural model seeding. In: Software Testing, Verification and Reliability (May 2020). http://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1733.

Crash reproduction difficulty, an initial assessment

This study presents the initial step towards a thorough analysis of the difficulty to reproduce a crash using searchbased crash reproduction. Traditionally, code size and complexity are considered representative indicators of the difficulty for search-based approaches, like search-based unit test generation, to generate tests. However, unlike...

It is not Only About Control Dependent Nodes: Basic Block Coverage for Search-Based Crash Reproduction

Search-based techniques have been widely used for white-box test generation. Many of these approaches rely on the approach level and branch distance heuristics to guide the search process and generate test cases with high line and branch coverage. Despite the positive results achieved by these two heuristics, they only use the information...

Automated crash fault localization

Debugging application crashes is an expensive and time-taking process, relying on the developer’s expertise, and requiring knowledge about the system. Over the years, the research community has developed several automated approaches to ease debugging. Among those approaches, search-based crash reproduction, which tries to generate a test case...

Fit2Crash: Specialising Fitness Functions for Crash Reproduction

Software applications inevitably crash, and it is time-consuming to recreate the crash conditions for debugging. Recently, researchers have developed frameworks relying on genetic algorithms, e.g. Botsing, for automated crash reproduction. However, the existing approaches process exceptions of different types as if they were the same. In this...

Search-Based Crash Reproduction and Its Impact on Debugging

Software systems fail. These failures are often reported to issue tracking systems, where they are prioritized and assigned to responsible developers to be investigated. When developers debug software, they need to reproduce the reported failure in order to verify whether their fix actually prevents the failure from happening again. Since...

Crash Reproduction Using Helper Objectives

Evolutionary-based crash reproduction techniques aid developers in their debugging practices by generating a test case that reproduces a crash given its stack trace. In these techniques, the search process is typically guided by a single search objective called Crash Distance. Previous studies have shown that current approaches could only...

A benchmark-based evaluation of search-based crash reproduction

Crash reproduction approaches help developers during debugging by generating a test case that reproduces a given crash. Several solutions have been proposed to automate this task. However, the proposed solutions have been evaluated on a limited number of projects, making comparison difficult. In this paper, we enhance this line of research by...

Search-based crash reproduction using behavioural model seeding

Search-based crash reproduction approaches assist developers during debugging by generating a test case, which reproduces a crash given its stack trace. One of the fundamental steps of this approach is creating objects needed to trigger the crash. One way to overcome this limitation is seeding: using information about the application during the...

Good Things Come In Threes: Improving Search-based Crash Reproduction With Helper Objectives

Writing a test case reproducing a reported software crash is a common practice to identify the root cause of an anomaly in the software under test. However, this task is usually labor-intensive and time-taking. Hence, evolutionary intelligence approaches have been successfully applied to assist developers during debugging by generating a test...

Botsing, a Search-based Crash Reproduction Framework for Java

Approaches for automatic crash reproduction aim to generate test cases that reproduce crashes starting from the crash stack traces. These tests help developers during their debugging practices. One of the most promising techniques in this research field leverages search-based software testing techniques for generating crash reproducing test...

A Guided Genetic Algorithm for Automated Crash Reproduction

To reduce the effort developers have to make for crash debugging, researchers have proposed several solutions for automatic failure reproduction. Recent advances proposed the use of symbolic execution, mutation analysis, and directed model checking as underling techniques for post-failure analysis of crash stack traces. However, existing...

Evolutionary testing for crash reproduction

Manual crash reproduction is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. Therefore, several solutions have been proposed in literature for automatic crash reproduction, including generating unit tests via symbolic execution and mutation analysis. However, various limitations adversely affect the capabilities of the existing solutions in...