Boundary Value Exploration for Software Analysis

For software to be reliable and resilient, it is widely accepted that tests must be created and maintained alongside the software itself. One safeguard from vulnerabilities and failures in code is to ensure correct behavior on the boundaries between sub-domains of the input space. So-called boundary value analysis (BVA) and boundary value testing (BVT) techniques aim to exercise those boundaries and increase test effectiveness. However, the concepts of BVA and BVT themselves are not clearly defined and it is not clear how to identify relevant sub-domains, and thus the boundaries delineating them, given a specification. This has limited adoption and hindered automation. We clarify BVA and BVT and introduce Boundary Value Exploration (BVE) to describe techniques that support them by helping to detect and identify boundary inputs. Additionally, we propose two concrete BVE techniques based on information-theoretic distance functions: (i) an algorithm for boundary detection and (ii) the usage of software visualization to explore the behavior of the software under test and identify its boundary behavior. As an initial evaluation, we apply these techniques on a much used and well-tested date handling library. Our results reveal questionable behavior at boundaries highlighted by our techniques. In conclusion, we argue that the boundary value exploration that our techniques enable is a step towards automated boundary value analysis and testing which can foster their wider use and improve test effectiveness and efficiency

A tertiary systematic literature review on software visualization

Software visualization (SV) allows us to visualize different aspects and artifacts related to software, thus helping engineers understanding its underlying design and functionalities in a more efficient and faster way. In this paper, we conducted a tertiary systematic literature review to identify, classify, and evaluate the current state of the art on software visualization from 48 software visualization secondary studies, following three perspectives: publication trends, software visualization topics and techniques, and issues related to research field. Hence, we summarized the main findings among popular sub-fields of SV, identifying potential research directions and fifteen shared recommendations for developers, instructors and researchers. Our main findings are the lack of rigorous evaluation or theories support to assess SV tools effectiveness, the disconnection between tool design and their scope, and the dispersal of the research community