Publicaties

Software testing enables development teams to maintain the quality of a software system while it evolves. The database manipulation code requires special attention in this context. However, it is often neglected and suffers from software maintenance problems. In this paper, we study the current state-of-the-practice in testing database manipulation code. We first analysed the tests of 72 open-source projects to gain insight into the coverage of ...

Mutation testing is the state-of-the-art technique to evaluate the fault-detection capabilities of a test suite, but its adoption has been limited. In this paper, we aim to investigate where mutation testing fits within the existing test strategies, whether the mutation analysis can be done in a timely manner, and which pain points remain to be tackled for industrial integration. For this, we performed open format interviews with two companies ...

The environmental conditions in a conservation-restoration studio for paintings induce an inherent risk to objects of art and to humans working on those objects. They are both subject to (sometimes dangerous) chemical substances and fluctuations in environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, relative humidity). In this paper, we report on a measuring campaign which lasted more than a year collecting data about the air quality within a painting ...

Several experience reports illustrate that mutation testing is capable of supporting a “shift-left” testing strategy for software systems coded in textual programming languages like C++. For graphical modelling languages like Simulink, such experience reports are missing, primarily because of a lack of adequate tool support. In this paper we present a proof-of-concept (named MUT4SLX) for automatic mutant generation and test execution of Simulink ...

With the rise of social coding platforms that rely on distributed version control systems, software reuse is also on the rise. Through the provision of explicit facilities to share code like pull requests, cherry-picking, and traceability links, social coding platforms have popularised forking (also referred to as ``clone-and-own''). Two types of forks exist: (i) social forks that are created for isolated development to fix a bug, feature, ...

Mutation testing is the state‐of‐the‐art technique for assessing the fault detection capacity of a test suite. Unfortunately, a full mutation analysis is often prohibitively expensive. The CppCheck project for instance, demands a build time of 5.8 min and a test execution time of 17 s on our desktop computer. An unoptimised mutation analysis, for 55,000 generated mutants took 11.8 days in total, of which 4.3 days is spent on (re)compiling the ...

The pace of reporting on Digital Twin (DT) projects continues to accelerate both in industry and academia. However, these experience reports often leave out essential characteristics of the DT, such as the scope of the system-under-study, the insights and actions enabled, and the time-scale of processing. A lack of these details could therefore hamper both understanding of these DTs and development of DT tools and techniques. Our previous work ...

F-ASTMut is an open-source mutation testing research tool for the C language family based on manipulation of the abstract syntax tree. The tool is designed for detailed measurements, analysis, and tuning of optimisation techniques. The goal of F-ASTMut is to analyse the speedups of optimisation techniques to ultimately enable mutation testing in industrial settings. Currently, F-ASTMut features four optimisation techniques; an exclusion scheme ...

Solidity is the dominant programming language for specifying smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain platform. Smart contracts permit the exchange of cryptocurrency, and hence are vulnerable to security attacks, most notably reentrancy exploits. Extensions to the solidity language, therefore, provide safer alternatives via special-purpose syntactic constructs. Based on an analysis of 26,799 contracts actually deployed on the Ethereum ...

Software Engineering is often viewed as the discipline of developing new software systems from scratch. In practice, however, it is much more common that software development starts from a system to be modified or substituted. Software re-engineering is a difficult, error-prone, and expensive task. Therefore, automating software re-engineering emerges as an attractive opportunity. Formal methods can help in automating software re-engineering, ...