Empirical Evaluation of Test Coverage for Functional Programs

The correlation between test coverage and test effectiveness is important to justify the use of coverage in practice. Existing results on imperative programs mostly show that test coverage predicates effectiveness. However, since functional programs are usually structurally different from imperative ones, it is unclear whether the same result may be derived and coverage can be used as a prediction of effectiveness on functional programs. In this paper we report the first empirical study on the correlation between test coverage and test effectiveness on functional programs. We consider four types of coverage: as input coverages, statement/branch coverage and expression coverage, and as oracle coverages, count of assertions and checked coverage. We also consider two types of effectiveness: raw effectiveness and normalized effectiveness. Our results are twofold. (1) In general the findings on imperative programs still hold on functional programs, warranting the use of coverage in practice. (2) On specific coverage criteria, the results may be unexpected or different from the imperative ones, calling for further studies on functional programs

Faster Mutation Analysis via Equivalence Modulo States

Mutation analysis has many applications, such as asserting the quality of test suites and localizing faults. One important bottleneck of mutation analysis is scalability. The latest work explores the possibility of reducing the redundant execution via split-stream execution. However, split-stream execution is only able to remove redundant execution before the first mutated statement. In this paper we try to also reduce some of the redundant execution after the execution of the first mutated statement. We observe that, although many mutated statements are not equivalent, the execution result of those mutated statements may still be equivalent to the result of the original statement. In other words, the statements are equivalent modulo the current state. In this paper we propose a fast mutation analysis approach, AccMut. AccMut automatically detects the equivalence modulo states among a statement and its mutations, then groups the statements into equivalence classes modulo states, and uses only one process to represent each class. In this way, we can significantly reduce the number of split processes. Our experiments show that our approach can further accelerate mutation analysis on top of split-stream execution with a speedup of 2.56x on average.Comment: Submitted to conferenc

Collaborative Inventory Management in Chinese Hospital Supply Chain: Barriers and Implementation

With the development of supply chain, the collaborative supply chain management has increasing popular worldwide in recent years. There are many advanced method of achieving supply chain collaboration, such as VMI and CPFR, which focus on inventory management. In addition, it has been adopted by many industries such as manufacture (Dell) and retail (Wal-Mart). With the dramatically increasing of China drug market, more and more supply chain problems have appeared recent years. Due to redundant structure and complex network of pharmaceutical supply chain with high supply-related cost, it is necessary and urgent to integrating supply chain and developing collaborative inventory management (CIM). However, there are many problems block the implementation of CIM. This aims of this research is to find the current issues existing in hospital pharmacy inventory management as well as the barriers of implementing CIM in the whole pharmaceutical supply chain. Finally, combining with the capacity of pharmaceutical industry and the culture of China, the solution would be given at the end with some discussions. In this research, there are two methodology applied, interview and case study. The interview focus on understanding the current issue and barriers from different members involved in hospital supply chain. It includes 11 interviewees from 4 aspects of the supply chain (manufacturer, wholesaler/distributor, hospital and government). In order to analyse specific problem of hospital pharmacy inventory management, one wholesaler/distributor company is selected from the previous interviewees with its upstream suppliers and upstream hospital. The customised modification is raised by using VMI and CPFR. In addition, combining with the outcome of interviews, the implementation of CIM in future China would be discussed at the end