An Investigation into the Effect of Control and Data Dependence Chain Length on Predicate Testability

by Dave Binkley, James Glenn, Abdullah Alsharif, and Phil McMinn

Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation

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Abstract

The squeeziness of a sequence of program statements captures the loss of information (loss of entropy) caused by its execution. This information loss leads to problems such as failed error propagation. Intuitively, longer more complex statement sequences (more formally, longer paths of dependencies) bring greater squeeze. Using the cost of meta-heuristic search as a measure of lost information, we Following Voas and Miller we use Using the cost of search-based test data generation as a measure of lost information, we investigate this intuition. Unexpectedly, we find virtually no correlation between dependence path length and information loss. Thus our study represents an (unexpected) negative result. Moreover, looking through the literature, this finding is in agreement with recent work of Masri and Podgurski. % (who also express some level of surprise). As such, our work replicates a negative result. More precisely, it provides a conceptual, generalization and extension replication. The replication falls into the category of a conceptual replication in that different methods are used to address a common problem, and into the category of generalization and extension in that we sample a different population of subjects and more rigorously consider the resulting data. Specifically, while Masri and Podgurski only informally observed the lack of a connection, we rigorously assess it using a range of statistical models.

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Reference

Dave Binkley, James Glenn, Abdullah Alsharif, and Phil McMinn. An Investigation into the Effect of Control and Data Dependence Chain Length on Predicate Testability. International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis & Manipulation (SCAM 2020), 2020

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BibTex Entry

                @inproceedings{Binkley2020,
                    author    = "Binkley, Dave and Glenn, James and Alsharif, Abdullah and McMinn, Phil",
                    title     = "An Investigation into the Effect of Control and Data Dependence Chain Length on Predicate Testability",
                    booktitle = "International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis \& Manipulation (SCAM 2020)",
                    year      = "2020"
                }