109,353 research outputs found
Test Set Diameter: Quantifying the Diversity of Sets of Test Cases
A common and natural intuition among software testers is that test cases need
to differ if a software system is to be tested properly and its quality
ensured. Consequently, much research has gone into formulating distance
measures for how test cases, their inputs and/or their outputs differ. However,
common to these proposals is that they are data type specific and/or calculate
the diversity only between pairs of test inputs, traces or outputs.
We propose a new metric to measure the diversity of sets of tests: the test
set diameter (TSDm). It extends our earlier, pairwise test diversity metrics
based on recent advances in information theory regarding the calculation of the
normalized compression distance (NCD) for multisets. An advantage is that TSDm
can be applied regardless of data type and on any test-related information, not
only the test inputs. A downside is the increased computational time compared
to competing approaches.
Our experiments on four different systems show that the test set diameter can
help select test sets with higher structural and fault coverage than random
selection even when only applied to test inputs. This can enable early test
design and selection, prior to even having a software system to test, and
complement other types of test automation and analysis. We argue that this
quantification of test set diversity creates a number of opportunities to
better understand software quality and provides practical ways to increase it.Comment: In submissio
Test Set Diameter: Quantifying the Diversity of Sets of Test Cases
A common and natural intuition among software testers is that test cases need to differ if a software system is to be tested properly and its quality ensured. Consequently, much research has gone into formulating distance measures for how test cases, their inputs and/or their outputs differ. However, common to these proposals is that they are data type specific and/or calculate the diversity only between pairs of test inputs, traces or outputs. We propose a new metric to measure the diversity of sets of tests: the test set diameter (TSDm). It extends our earlier, pairwise test diversity metrics based on recent advances in information theory regarding the calculation of the normalized compression distance (NCD) for multisets. A key advantage is that TSDm is a universal measure of diversity and so can be applied to any test set regardless of data type of the test inputs (and, moreover, to other test-related data such as execution traces). But this universality comes at the cost of greater computational effort compared to competing approaches. Our experiments on four different systems show that the test set diameter can help select test sets with higher structural and fault coverage than random selection even when only applied to test inputs. This can enable early test design and selection, prior to even having a software system to test, and complement other types of test automation and analysis. We argue that this quantification of test set diversity creates a number of opportunities to better understand software quality and provides practical ways to increase it
Searching for test data with feature diversity
There is an implicit assumption in software testing that more diverse and
varied test data is needed for effective testing and to achieve different types
and levels of coverage. Generic approaches based on information theory to
measure and thus, implicitly, to create diverse data have also been proposed.
However, if the tester is able to identify features of the test data that are
important for the particular domain or context in which the testing is being
performed, the use of generic diversity measures such as this may not be
sufficient nor efficient for creating test inputs that show diversity in terms
of these features. Here we investigate different approaches to find data that
are diverse according to a specific set of features, such as length, depth of
recursion etc. Even though these features will be less general than measures
based on information theory, their use may provide a tester with more direct
control over the type of diversity that is present in the test data. Our
experiments are carried out in the context of a general test data generation
framework that can generate both numerical and highly structured data. We
compare random sampling for feature-diversity to different approaches based on
search and find a hill climbing search to be efficient. The experiments
highlight many trade-offs that needs to be taken into account when searching
for diversity. We argue that recurrent test data generation motivates building
statistical models that can then help to more quickly achieve feature
diversity.Comment: This version was submitted on April 14th 201
Learning to Diversify Web Search Results with a Document Repulsion Model
Search diversification (also called diversity search), is an important approach to tackling the query ambiguity problem in information retrieval. It aims to diversify the search results that are originally ranked according to their probabilities of relevance to a given query, by re-ranking them to cover as many as possible different aspects (or subtopics) of the query. Most existing diversity search models heuristically balance the relevance ranking and the diversity ranking, yet lacking an efficient learning mechanism to reach an optimized parameter setting. To address this problem, we propose a learning-to-diversify approach which can directly optimize the search diversification performance (in term of any effectiveness metric). We first extend the ranking function of a widely used learning-to-rank framework, i.e., LambdaMART, so that the extended ranking function can correlate relevance and diversity indicators. Furthermore, we develop an effective learning algorithm, namely Document Repulsion Model (DRM), to train the ranking function based on a Document Repulsion Theory (DRT). DRT assumes that two result documents covering similar query aspects (i.e., subtopics) should be mutually repulsive, for the purpose of search diversification. Accordingly, the proposed DRM exerts a repulsion force between each pair of similar documents in the learning process, and includes the diversity effectiveness metric to be optimized as part of the loss function. Although there have been existing learning based diversity search methods, they often involve an iterative sequential selection process in the ranking process, which is computationally complex and time consuming for training, while our proposed learning strategy can largely reduce the time cost. Extensive experiments are conducted on the TREC diversity track data (2009, 2010 and 2011). The results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms a number of baselines in terms of effectiveness and robustness. Further, an efficiency analysis shows that the proposed DRM has a lower computational complexity than the state of the art learning-to-diversify methods
Search algorithms for regression test case prioritization
Regression testing is an expensive, but important, process. Unfortunately, there may be insufficient resources to allow for the re-execution of all test cases during regression testing. In this situation, test case prioritisation techniques aim to improve the effectiveness of regression testing, by ordering the test cases so that the most beneficial are executed first. Previous work on regression test case prioritisation has focused on Greedy Algorithms. However, it is known that these algorithms may produce sub-optimal results, because they may construct results that denote only local minima within the search space. By contrast, meta-heuristic and evolutionary search algorithms aim to avoid such problems. This paper presents results from an empirical study of the application of several greedy, meta-heuristic and evolutionary search algorithms to six programs, ranging from 374 to 11,148 lines of code for 3 choices of fitness metric. The paper addresses the problems of choice of fitness metric, characterisation of landscape modality and determination of the most suitable search technique to apply. The empirical results replicate previous results concerning Greedy Algorithms. They shed light on the nature of the regression testing search space, indicating that it is multi-modal. The results also show that Genetic Algorithms perform well, although Greedy approaches are surprisingly effective, given the multi-modal nature of the landscape
k-Nearest Neighbour Classifiers: 2nd Edition (with Python examples)
Perhaps the most straightforward classifier in the arsenal or machine
learning techniques is the Nearest Neighbour Classifier -- classification is
achieved by identifying the nearest neighbours to a query example and using
those neighbours to determine the class of the query. This approach to
classification is of particular importance because issues of poor run-time
performance is not such a problem these days with the computational power that
is available. This paper presents an overview of techniques for Nearest
Neighbour classification focusing on; mechanisms for assessing similarity
(distance), computational issues in identifying nearest neighbours and
mechanisms for reducing the dimension of the data.
This paper is the second edition of a paper previously published as a
technical report. Sections on similarity measures for time-series, retrieval
speed-up and intrinsic dimensionality have been added. An Appendix is included
providing access to Python code for the key methods.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures: An updated edition of an older tutorial on kN
Sparse spatial selection for novelty-based search result diversification
Abstract. Novelty-based diversification approaches aim to produce a diverse ranking by directly comparing the retrieved documents. However, since such approaches are typically greedy, they require O(n 2) documentdocument comparisons in order to diversify a ranking of n documents. In this work, we propose to model novelty-based diversification as a similarity search in a sparse metric space. In particular, we exploit the triangle inequality property of metric spaces in order to drastically reduce the number of required document-document comparisons. Thorough experiments using three TREC test collections show that our approach is at least as effective as existing novelty-based diversification approaches, while improving their efficiency by an order of magnitude.
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