Enhancing POI Testing Through the Use of Additional Information

Abstract

Recently, a new approach to perform regression testing has been defined: the point of interest (POI) testing. A POI, in this context, is any expression of a program. The approach receives as input a set of relations between POIs from a version of a program and POIs from another version, and also a sequence of input functions, i.e. test cases. Then, a program instrumentation, an input test case generation and different comparison functions are used to obtain the final report which indicates whether the alternative version of the program behaves as expected, e.g. it produces the same values or it uses less CPU/memory. In this paper, we explain how we can improve the POI testing approach through the use of common stack traces and a more sophisticated tracing for calls. These enhancements of the approach allow users to identify errors earlier and easier. Additionally, they enable new comparison modes and new categories of reported unexpected behaviours.2 Steps (ii) and (iii) could also be executed in parallel. Here, for the sake of simplicity, we only consider the sequential execution of these steps.

Analysis Techniques for Software Maintenance

“…The chapter describes the internals of POI testing, illustrating the required program transformations to extract traces and runtime information, its applicability in programs with concurrency, and the implementation and evaluation of a tool to run POI testing in Erlang. The content of this chapter summarises the research line of POI testing, published in [87,89,153].…”

“…• In Chapter 8, we proposed a new testing approach, the Point Of Interest (POI) testing [87,89,153]. POI testing is used to compare the behaviour of an arbitrary program point in different program versions.…”