Welcome to ISSTA 2004: the Fourteenth International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. ISSTA 2004 brings together academics, industrial researchers, and practitioners to exchange new ideas, solve problems, and share experiences related to ...

Software process and work flow languages are increasingly used to define loosely-coupled systems of systems. These languages focus on coordination issues such as data flow and control flow among the subsystems and exception handling activities. The ...

We introduce a formal model for describing Real-Time CORBA-based applications, and a set of guidelines to formally check that the design of such an application is consistent with its specification. The model and the guidelines are then applied to the ...

The use of XML as the de facto data exchange standard has allowed integration of heterogeneous web based software systems regardless of implementation platforms and programming languages. On the other hand, the rich tree-structured data representation, ...

In this paper, we present an approach to automatically detect high impact coding errors in large Java applications which use frameworks. These high impact errors cause serious performance degradation and outages in real world production environments, are ...

Constraints in predicate or relational logic can be translated into boolean logic and solved with a SAT solver. For faster solving, it is common to exploit the typing of predicates or relations, in order to reduce the number of boolean variables needed ...

The notion that certain procedures are atomic is a fundamental correctness property of many multithreaded software systems. A procedure is atomic if for every execution there is an equivalent serial execution in which the actions performed by any thread ...

In this paper, we present two slicing tools: VHDL_Slice and Est_slice that compute static executable slices of VHDL and Esterel programs respectively. The slicers have been tested on a number of small and medium sized examples.

A multi-mode software system contains several distinct modes of operation and a controller for deciding when to switch between modes. Even when developers rigorously test a multi-mode system before deployment, they cannot foresee and test for every ...

A program's behavior is ultimately the collection of all its executions. This collection is diverse, unpredictable, and generally unbounded. Thus it is especially suited to statistical analysis and machine learning techniques. The primary focus of this ...

Model checking based on validating temporal logic formulas has proven practical and effective for numerous software engineering applications. As systems based on this approach have become more mainstream, a need has arisen to deal effectively with large ...

Two operations commute if executing them serially in either order results in the same change of state. In a system in which commands may be issued simultaneously by different users, lack of commutativity can result in unpredictable behaviour, even if ...

We introduce necessary and sufficient conditions for comparing the expected values of the number of failures caused by applications of software testing techniques. Our conditions are based only on the knowledge of a total or even a hierarchical order ...

We consider black-box testing of functional correctness as a special case of a satisfiability or constraint solving problem. We introduce a general method for solving this problem based on function approximation. We then describe some practical results ...

The contribution of this paper is an experiment that shows the potential value of a combination of selective reverse engineering to formal specifications and bounded exhaustive testing to improve the assurance levels of complex software. A key problem ...

We describe the tools and interfaces created by the AGEDIS project, a European Commission sponsored project for the creation of a methodology and tools for automated model driven test generation and execution for distributed systems. The project ...

Object oriented programming promotes reuse of classes in multiple contexts. Thus, a class is designed and implemented with several usage scenarios in mind, some of which possibly open and generic. Correspondingly, the unit testing of classes cannot make ...

Evolutionary testing is an effective technique for automatically generating good quality test data. However, for structural testing, the technique degenerates to random testing in the presence of flag variables, which also present problems for other ...

We show how model checking and symbolic execution can be used to generate test inputs to achieve structural coverage of code that manipulates complex data structures. We focus on obtaining branch-coverage during unit testing of some of the core methods ...

The ability to predict which files in a large software system are most likely to contain the largest numbers of faults in the next release can be a very valuable asset. To accomplish this, a negative binomial regression model using information from ...