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Test oracle assessment and improvement

Jahangirova, G; Clark, D; Harman, M; Tonella, P; (2016) Test oracle assessment and improvement. In: Zeller, A and Roychoudhury, A, (eds.) ISSTA 2016: Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. (pp. pp. 247-258). Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): New York, NY, USA. Green open access

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Abstract

We introduce a technique for assessing and improving test oracles by reducing the incidence of both false positives and false negatives. We prove that our approach can always result in an increase in the mutual information between the actual and perfect oracles. Our technique combines test case generation to reveal false positives and mutation testing to reveal false negatives. We applied the decision support tool that implements our oracle improvement technique to five real-world subjects. The experimental results show that the fault detection rate of the oracles after improvement increases, on average, by 48.6% (86% over the implicit oracle). Three actual, exposed faults in the studied systems were subsequently confirmed and fixed by the developers.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Test oracle assessment and improvement
Event: 25th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2016)
ISBN-13: 9781450343909
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1145/2931037.2931062
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2931037.2931062
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Test oracle; test case generation; mutation testing
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1493269
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