NDLI: Discovering complete API rules with mutation testing

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Anh Cuong Nguyen Siau-Cheng Khoo
Copyright Year	2012
Description	Author affiliation: Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore (Anh Cuong Nguyen; Siau-Cheng Khoo)
Abstract	Specifications are important for many activities during software construction and maintenance process such as testing, verification, debugging and repairing. Despite their importance, specifications are often missing, informal or incomplete because they are difficult to write manually. Many techniques have been proposed to automatically mine specifications describing method call sequence from execution traces or source code using frequent pattern mining. Unfortunately, a sizeable number of such “interesting” specifications discovered by frequent pattern mining may not capture the correct use patterns of method calls. Consequently, when used in software testing or verification, these mined specifications lead to many false positive defects, which in turn consume much effort for manual investigation. We present a novel framework for automatically discovering legitimate specifications from execution traces using a mutation testing based approach. Such an approach gives a semantics bearing to the legitimacy of the discovered specifications. We introduce the notion of maximal precision and completeness as the desired forms of discovered specifications, and describe in detail suppression techniques that aid efficient discovery. Preliminary evaluation of this approach on several open source software projects shows that specifications discovered through our approach, compared with those discovered through frequent pattern mining, are much more precise and complete. When used in finding bugs, our specifications also locate defects with significantly fewer false positives and more true positives.
Starting Page	151
Ending Page	160
File Size	433989
Page Count	10
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781467317603
ISSN	21601860
e-ISBN	9781467317610
DOI	10.1109/MSR.2012.6224275
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2012-06-02
Publisher Place	Switzerland
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Java Computer bugs Semantics mutation testing Data mining specification mining formal specifications Open source software Testing
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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