Publicaties

"In Silico" research drives the world around us, as illustrated by the way our society handles climate change, controls the COVID-19 pandemic and governs economic growth. Unfortunately, the code embedded in the underlying data processing is mostly written by scientists lacking formal training in software engineering. The resulting code is vulnerable, suffering from what is known as threats to instrument validity. This position paper aims to ...

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 modeling languages like Simulink, such experience reports are missing, primarily because of a lack of adequate tool support. In this paper, we extend MUT4SLX, a tool for automatic mutant generation and test execution of Simulink models based on ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

The growing reliance on automated software tests raises a fundamental question: How trustworthy are these automated tests? Today, mutation testing is acknowledged within academic circles as the most promising technique for assessing the fault-detection capability of a test suite. The technique deliberately injects faults (called mutants) into the production code and counts how many of them are caught by the test suite. Mutation testing shines in ...

The pace of reporting on Digital Twin (DT) projects contin- ues to accelerate both in industry and academia. However, these experi- ence 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 ...

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 ...

Recent research has shown that clones occur far more often in test code than in production code. This is explained by the typical template of unit test code (the setup-stimulate-verify-teardown cycle), a template which lends itself well to parameterisation of proven solutions. However, little is known on how these clones evolve over time. In this paper, we compare the evolution of clones in test code with those in production code. Based on a ...