Systems And Methods For Visualization Of Exception Handling Constructs

Disclosed are various embodiments for visualization of exception-handling constructs. In one embodiment, among others, a system includes at least one computing device; a program maintained in a memory accessible to the at least one computing device; and logic executable in the at least one computing device configured to analyze the program to determine exception-handling information; generate a graphical user interface based upon the exception-handling information; and provide the graphical user interface for display on a display device.Georgia Tech Research Corporatio

Guidelines for coverage-based comparisons of non-adequate test suites

A fundamental question in software testing research is how to compare test suites, often as a means for comparing test-generation techniques that produce those test suites. Researchers frequently compare test suites by measuring their coverage. A coverage criterion C provides a set of test requirements and measures how many requirements a given suite satisfies. A suite that satisfies 100% of the (feasible) requirements is called C-adequate. Previous rigorous evaluations of coverage criteria mostly focused on such adequate test suites: given two criteria C and C′, are C-adequate suites (on average) more effective than C′-adequate suites? However, in many realistic cases, producing adequate suites is impractical or even impossible. This thesis presents the first extensive study that evaluates coverage criteria for the com- mon case of non-adequate test suites: given two criteria C and C′, which one is better to use to compare test suites? Namely, if suites T1, T2,...,Tn have coverage values c1,c2,...,cn for C and c′1,c2,...,c′n for C′, is it better to compare suites based on c1,c2,...,cn or based on c′1,c2,...,c′n? This thesis evaluates a large set of plausible criteria, including basic criteria such as statement and branch coverage, as well as stronger criteria used in recent studies, including criteria based on program paths, equivalence classes of covered statements, and predicate states. The criteria are evaluated on a set of Java and C programs with both manually written and automatically generated test suites. The evaluation uses three correlation measures. Based on these experiments, two criteria perform best: branch coverage and an intra-procedural acyclic path coverage. We provide guidelines for testing researchers aiming to evaluate test suites using coverage criteria as well as for other researchers evaluating coverage criteria for research use

Navigating Error Recovery Code in Java Applications

Java provides a program-level exception handling mechanism in response to error conditions (that are translated into exceptions by Java VM). However, exception handling code is often widely scattered throughout an application and untested. This paper presents a program visualization tool ExTest that shows quite precisely all the handlers for exceptions triggered by certain kinds of operations, and for each of these handlers, all the witness paths of how the operation would be triggered. Thus, ExTest helps programmers understand the exception handling behavior of Java programs and also facilitates testing exception handling code. 1