SIGSOFT

Why are there so few successful "real-world" programming and testing tools based on academic research? This talk focuses on program analysis tools, and proposes a surprisingly simple explanation with interesting ramifications.

For a tool aimed at ...

Why are there so few successful "real-world" programming and testing tools based on academic research? This talk focuses on program analysis tools, and proposes a surprisingly simple explanation with interesting ramifications.

For a tool aimed at ...

A method for finding bugs in code is presented. For given small numbers j and k, the code of a procedure is translated into a rela-tional formula whose models represent all execution traces that involve at most j heap cells and k loop iterations. This ...

Programs developed with object technologies have unique features that often make traditional testing methods inadequate. Consider, for instance, the dependence between the state of an object and the behavior of that object: The outcome of a method ...

This paper presents a strategy for structural testing of object-oriented software systems with possibly unknown clients and unknown information about invoked methods. By exploiting the combined points-to and escape analysis developed for compiler ...

Increasing numbers of software developers are using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and associated visual modeling tools as a basis for the design and implementation of their distributed, component-based applications. At the same time, it is ...

Subdomains of a program's input space are a concept around which ideas about testing can be organized. This paper considers the questions, ``What are the best subdomains for:

testing to detecting failures

defining operational profiles

measuring component ...

Before designing safety- or mission-critical real-time systems, a specification of the required behaviour of the system should be produced and reviewed by domain experts. After the system has been implemented, it should be thoroughly tested to ensure ...

This paper presents three sets of classification schemes for processes, properties, and transitions that can be used to assist in the analysis of real-time systems. These classification schemes are discussed in the context of ASTRAL, which is a formal ...

It seems important that the complex processes that synergize humans and computers to solve widening classes of societal problems be subjected to rigorous analysis. One approach is to use a process definition language to specify these processes and to ...

Test case prioritization techniques schedule test cases in an order that increases their effectiveness in meeting some performance goal. One performance goal, rate of fault detection, is a measure of how quickly faults are detected within the testing ...

During the past two decades many different pointer analysis algorithms have been published. Although some descriptions include measurements of the effectiveness of the algorithm, qualitative comparisons among algorithms are difficult because of varying ...

Many analytical and empirical studies of software testing effectiveness have used the probability that a test set exposes at least one fault as the measure of effectiveness. That measure is useful for evaluating testing techniques when the goal of ...

Given some test case, a program fails. Which part of the test case is responsible for the particular failure? We show how our delta debugging algorithm generalizes and simplifies some failing input to a minimal test case that produces the failure.

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Ever since formal verification was first proposed in the late sixties, the idea of being able to definitively determine if a program meets its specifications has been an appealing, but elusive, goal. Although verification systems based on theorem ...

Database systems play an important role in nearly every modern organization, yet relatively little research effort has focused on how to test them. This paper discusses issues arising in testing database systems and presents an approach to testing ...

We describe the design of jRapture: a tool for capturing and replaying Java program executions in the field. jRapture works with Java binaries (byte code) and any compliant implementation of the Java virtual machine. It employs a lightweight, ...

A number of different concepts have been proposed that, loosely speaking, revolve around the notion of software testability. Indeed, the concept of testability itself has been interpreted in a variety of ways by the software community. One ...

Test reduction is an important issue in black-box testing. The number of possible black-box tests for any non-trivial software application is extremely large. For the class of programs with multiple inputs and outputs, the number of possible tests ...

Software components enable practical reuse of software parts and amortization of investments over multiple applications. Each part or component is well defined and independently deployable. Composition is the key technique by which systems of software ...

Automatic state exploration tools (model checkers) have had some success when applied to protocols and hardware designs, but there are fewer success stories about software. This is unfortunate, since the software problem is worsening even faster than ...

Slicing is a well-known program analysis technique for analyzing sequential programs and found useful in debugging, testing and reverse engineering. This paper extends the notion of slicing to concurrent programs with shared memory, interleaving ...

The Inequality Necessary Condition Analyzer (INCA) is a finite-state verification tool that has been able to check properties of some very large concurrent systems. INCA checks a property of a concurrent system by generating a system of inequalities ...

While threads have become an accepted and standardized model for expressing concurrency and exploiting parallelism for the shared-memory model, debugging threads is still poorly supported. This paper identifies challenges in debugging threads and offers ...