On practical adequate test suites for integrated test case prioritization and fault localization

An effective integration between testing and debugging should address how well testing and fault localization can work together productively. In this paper, we report an empirical study on the effectiveness of using adequate test suites for fault localization. We also investigate the integration of test case prioritization and statistical fault localization with a postmortem analysis approach. Our results on 16 test case prioritization techniques and four statistical fault localization techniques show that, although much advancement has been made in the last decade, test adequacy criteria are still insufficient in supporting effective fault localization. We also find that the use of branch-adequate test suites is more likely than statement-adequate test suites in the effective support of statistical fault localization. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 11th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC 2011), Madrid, Spain, 13-14 July 2011. In International Conference on Quality Software Proceedings, 2011, p. 21-3

A Sequential Inspection Procedure for Fault Detection in Multistage Manufacturing Processes

Fault diagnosis in multistage manufacturing processes (MMPs) is a challenging task where most of the research presented in the literature considers a predefined inspection scheme to identify the sources of variation and make the process diagnosable. In this paper, a sequential inspection procedure to detect the process fault based on a sequential testing algorithm and a minimum monitoring system is proposed. After the monitoring system detects that the process is out of statistical control, the features to be inspected (end of line or in process measurements) are defined sequentially according to the expected information gain of each potential inspection measurement. A case study is analyzed to prove the benefits of this approach with respect to a predefined inspection scheme and a randomized sequential inspection considering both the use and non-use of fault probabilities from historical maintenance data

Visualizing defects in source code

Trabalho de investigação desenvolvido na Cranfield University. School of EngineeringTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Prioritizing tests for software fault localization

Paper submitted for review at QSIC'10 Test prioritization techniques select test cases that maximize the confidence on the correctness of the system when the resources for quality assurance (QA) are limited. In the event of a test failing, the fault at the root of the failure has to be localized, adding an extra debugging cost that has to be taken into account as well. However, test suites that are prioritized for failure detection can reduce the amount of useful information for fault localization. This deteriorates the quality of the diagnosis provided, making the subsequent debugging phase more expensive, and defeating the purpose of the test cost minimization. In this paper we introduce a new test case prioritization approach that maximizes the improvement of the diagnostic information per test. Our approach minimizes the loss of diagnostic quality in the prioritized test suite. When considering QA cost as the combination of testing cost and debugging cost, on the Siemens set, the results of our test case prioritization approach show up to a 53% reduction of the overall QA cost, compared with the next best technique .Software Computer TechnologyElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc