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An empirical framework for comparing effectiveness of testing and property-based formal analysis

Published: 05 September 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Today, many formal analysis tools are not only used to provide certainty but are also used to debug software systems - a role that has traditional been reserved for testing tools. We are interested in exploring the complementary relationship as well as tradeoffs between testing and formal analysis with respect to debugging and more specifically bug detection. In this paper we present an approach to the assessment of testing and formal analysis tools using metrics to measure the quantity and efficiency of each technique at finding bugs. We also present an assessment framework that has been constructed to allow for symmetrical comparison and evaluation of tests versus properties. We are currently beginning to conduct experiments and this paper presents a discussion of possible outcomes of our proposed empirical study.

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Cited By

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  • (2015)MuRankerSoftware Testing, Verification & Reliability10.1002/stvr.154225:5-7(572-604)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2015
  • (2013)CCmutatorProceedings of the 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE.2013.6693142(722-725)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2013
  • (2011)The use of mutation in testing experiments and its sensitivity to external threatsProceedings of the 2011 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2001420.2001461(342-352)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2011
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
PASTE '05: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering
September 2005
118 pages
ISBN:1595932399
DOI:10.1145/1108792
  • cover image ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
    ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes  Volume 31, Issue 1
    January 2006
    203 pages
    ISSN:0163-5948
    DOI:10.1145/1108768
    Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 05 September 2005

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Author Tags

  1. bug detection
  2. empirical software engineering
  3. model checking
  4. mutation testing
  5. static analysis

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Overall Acceptance Rate 57 of 159 submissions, 36%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2015)MuRankerSoftware Testing, Verification & Reliability10.1002/stvr.154225:5-7(572-604)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2015
  • (2013)CCmutatorProceedings of the 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE.2013.6693142(722-725)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2013
  • (2011)The use of mutation in testing experiments and its sensitivity to external threatsProceedings of the 2011 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2001420.2001461(342-352)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2011
  • (2011)An experimental assessment of module documentation-based testingInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2011.01.00553:7(747-760)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2011
  • (2008)Model-Based Quality Assurance of Automotive SoftwareProceedings of the 11th international conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-540-87875-9_59(858-873)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2008
  • (2007)An Iterative Empirical Strategy for the Systematic Selection of a Combination of Verification and Validation TechnologiesProceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Quality10.1109/WOSQ.2007.4Online publication date: 20-May-2007
  • (2006)ExMAnProceedings of the Second Workshop on Mutation Analysis10.1109/MUTATION.2006.5Online publication date: 7-Nov-2006
  • (2006)Using source transformation to test and model check implicit-invocation systemsScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2006.04.00862:3(209-227)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2006
  • (2015)MuRankerSoftware Testing, Verification & Reliability10.1002/stvr.154225:5-7(572-604)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2015
  • (2010)Fault Evaluator: A tool for experimental investigation of effectiveness in software testing2010 IEEE International Conference on Progress in Informatics and Computing10.1109/PIC.2010.5688000(1077-1083)Online publication date: Dec-2010
  • Show More Cited By

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