Towards Statistical Prioritization for Software Product Lines Testing

Software Product Lines (SPL) are inherently difficult to test due to the combinatorial explosion of the number of products to consider. To reduce the number of products to test, sampling techniques such as combinatorial interaction testing have been proposed. They usually start from a feature model and apply a coverage criterion (e.g. pairwise feature interaction or dissimilarity) to generate tractable, fault-finding, lists of configurations to be tested. Prioritization can also be used to sort/generate such lists, optimizing coverage criteria or weights assigned to features. However, current sampling/prioritization techniques barely take product behavior into account. We explore how ideas of statistical testing, based on a usage model (a Markov chain), can be used to extract configurations of interest according to the likelihood of their executions. These executions are gathered in featured transition systems, compact representation of SPL behavior. We discuss possible scenarios and give a prioritization procedure illustrated on an example.Comment: Extended version published at VaMoS '14 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2556624.2556635

Towards Sampling and Simulation-Based Analysis of Featured Weighted Automata

International audienceWe consider the problem of model checking Variability-Intensive Systems (VIS) against non-functional requirements. These requirements are typically expressed as an optimization problem over quality attributes of interest, whose value is determined by the executions of the system. Identifying the optimal variant can be hard for two reasons. First, the state-explosion problem inherent to model checking makes it increasingly complex to find the optimal executions within a given variant. Second, the number of variants can grow exponentially with respect to the number of variation points in the VIS. In this paper, we lay the foundations for the application of smart sampling and statistical model checking to solve this problem faster. We design a simple method that samples variants and executions in a uniform manner from a featured weighted automaton and that assesses which of the sampled variants/executions are optimal. We implemented our approach on top of ProVeLines, a tool suite for model-checking VIS and carried out a preliminary evaluation on an industrial embedded system design case study. Our results tend to show that sampling-based approaches indeed holds the potential to improve scalability but should be supported by better sampling heuristics to be competitive

The "Baggaging" of Theory-Based Evaluation

We introduce SeMu, a Dynamic Symbolic Execution technique that generates test inputs capable of killing stubborn mutants (killable mutants that remain undetected after a reasonable amount of testing). SeMu aims at mutant propagation (triggering erroneous states to the program output) by incrementally searching for divergent program behaviours between the original and the mutant versions. We model the mutant killing problem as a symbolic execution search within a specific area in the programs' symbolic tree. In this framework, the search area is defined and controlled by parameters that allow scalable and cost-effective mutant killing. We integrate SeMu in KLEE and experimented with Coreutils (a benchmark frequently used in symbolic execution studies). Our results show that our modelling plays an important role in mutant killing. Perhaps more importantly, our results also show that, within a two-hour time limit, SeMu kills 37% of the stubborn mutants, where KLEE kills none and where the mutant infection strategy (strategy suggested by previous research) kills 17%