Building test oracles by clustering failures

Almaghairbe, Rafig and Roper, Marc; (2015) Building test oracles by clustering failures. In: 2015 IEEE/ACM 10th International Workshop on Automation of Software Test (AST). IEEE, pp. 3-7. (https://doi.org/10.1109/AST.2015.8)

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Abstract

In recent years, software testing research has produced notable advances in the area of automated test data generation, but the corresponding oracle problem (a mechanism for determine the (in)correctness of an executed test case) is still a major problem. In this paper, we present a preliminary study which investigates the application of anomaly detection techniques (based on clustering) to automatically build an oracle using a system’s input/output pairs, based on the hypothesis that failures will tend to group into small clusters. The fault detection capability of the approach is evaluated on two systems and the findings reveal that failing outputs do indeed tend to congregate in small clusters, suggesting that the approach is feasible and has the potential to reduce by an order of magnitude the numbers of outputs that would need to be manually examined following a test run.

ORCID iDs

Almaghairbe, Rafig ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8250-3909 and Roper, Marc ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6794-4637;
  • Item type:Book Section
    ID code:53650
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    2015
    Published
    18 February 2015
    Accepted
    Notes:© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
    Subjects:Science > Mathematics > Computer software
    Department:Faculty of Science > Computer and Information Sciences
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:08 Jul 2015 04:03
    Last modified:11 Nov 2024 15:00
    Related URLs:
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/53650
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