Quantifying Faultiness: What Does It Mean to Have N Faults?

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

5-1-2021

Abstract

It is common to see software testing experiments where a benchmark program is seeded with N benchmark mutations, then declared to have N faults. We argue that in the absence of a formal definition of what is a fault, let alone what are N faults, it is difficult to assign a meaning to such claims. We further argue that in order to assign a meaning to such a claim we must refer to five parameters, which we introduce and justify. To illustrate our ideas, we consider the tcas component of the Siemens benchmark, which we seed with eight mutations, and we find that not only is it wrong to claim that tcas has eight faults, it is also wrong to measure faultiness by the number of faults in a program.

Identifier

85114464452 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9781665439138]

Publication Title

Proceedings 2021 IEEE ACM 9th International Conference on Formal Methods in Software Engineering Formalise 2021

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1109/FormaliSE52586.2021.00013

First Page

68

Last Page

74

Grant

DGE 1565478

Fund Ref

National Science Foundation

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