Ranking programs using black box testing

We present an unbiased method for measuring the relative quality of different solutions to a programming problem. Our method is based on identifying possible bugs from program behaviour through black-box testing. The main motivation for such a method is its use in experimental evaluation of software development methods. We report on the use of our method in a small-scale such experiment, which was aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of property-based testing vs. unit testing in software development. Copyright 2010 ACM

Finding Race Conditions in Erlang with Quick Check and PULSE

We address the problem of testing and debugging concurrent, distributed Erlang applications. In concurrent programs, race conditions are a common class of bugs and are very hard to find in practice. Traditional unit testing is normally unable to help finding all race conditions, because their occurrence depends so much on timing. Therefore, race conditions are often found during system testing, where due to the vast amount of code under test, it is often hard to diagnose the error resulting from race conditions. We present three tools (Quick Check, PULSE, and a visualizer) that in combination can be used to test and debug concurrent programs in unit testing with a much better possibility of detecting race conditions. We evaluate our method on an industrial concurrent case study and illustrate how we find and analyze the race conditions

Measurement of the Tau Lepton Polarisation at LEP2

A first measurement of the average polarisation P_tau of tau leptons produced in e+e- annihilation at energies significantly above the Z resonance is presented. The polarisation is determined from the kinematic spectra of tau hadronic decays. The measured value P_tau = -0.164 +/- 0.125 is consistent with the Standard Model prediction for the mean LEP energy of 197 GeV.A first measurement of the average polarisation Pτ of tau leptons produced in e + e − annihilation at energies significantly above the Z resonance is presented. The polarisation is determined from the kinematic spectra of tau hadronic decays. The measured value Pτ=−0.164±0.125 is consistent with the Standard Model prediction for the mean LEP energy of 197 GeV.A first measurement of the average polarisation P_tau of tau leptons produced in e+e- annihilation at energies significantly above the Z resonance is presented. The polarisation is determined from the kinematic spectra of tau hadronic decays. The measured value P_tau = -0.164 +/- 0.125 is consistent with the Standard Model prediction for the mean LEP energy of 197 GeV