On the improvement of a fault classification scheme with implications for white-box testing

Nath, Shimul Kumar; Merkel, Robert; Lau, Man Fai

doi:10.1145/2245276.2231953

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Pan et al [1] present a catalog of 27 bug fix pattern and a tool to extract instances of them from source code. Nath et al [5] use the patterns to evaluate another Java open source project. However, they mined the pattern instances by hand.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatically Extracting Instances of Code Change Patterns with AST Analysis

Martínez

Duchien

Monperrus

2013

2013 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance

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Abstract-A code change pattern represents a kind of recurrent modification in software. For instance, a known code change pattern consists of the change of the conditional expression of an if statement. Previous work has identified different change patterns. Complementary to the identification and definition of change patterns, the automatic extraction of pattern instances is essential to measure their empirical importance. For example, it enables one to count and compare the number of conditional expression changes in the history of different projects. In this paper we present a novel approach for search patterns instances from software history. Our technique is based on the analysis of Abstract Syntax Trees (AST) files within a given commit. We validate our approach by counting instances of 18 change patterns in 6 open-source Java projects.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatically Extracting Instances of Code Change Patterns with AST Analysis

Martínez

Duchien

Monperrus

2013

2013 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance

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“…Although Pan et al did not use their taxonomy to fix software bugs, the taxonomy has had a significant impact on APR research. Several researchers have improved and extended Pan et al's taxonomy and used it in APR tools [38] [39] [40]. Due to its simplicity, Pan's taxonomy has also been extended to other programming languages, e.g.…”

Section: Derivation Shorthandmentioning

confidence: 99%

How do Developers Really Feel About Bug Fixing? Directions for Automatic Program Repair

Winter

Bowes

Counsell

et al. 2023

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Automatic program repair (APR) is a rapidly advancing field of software engineering that aims to supplement or replace manual bug fixing with an automated tool. For APR to be successfully adopted in industry, it is vital that APR tools respond to developer needs and preferences. However, very little research has considered developers' general attitudes to APR or developers' current bug fixing practices (the activity APR aims to replace). This paper responds to this gap by reporting on a survey of 386 software developers about their bug finding and fixing practices and experiences, and their instinctive attitudes towards APR. We find that bug finding and fixing is not necessarily as onerous for developers as has often been suggested, being rated as more satisfying than developers' general work. The fact that developers derive satisfaction and benefit from bug fixing indicates that APR adoption is not as simple as APR replacing an unwanted activity. When it comes to potential APR approaches, we find a strong preference for developers being kept in the loop (for example, choosing between different fixes or validating fixes) as opposed to a fully automated process. This suggests that advances in APR should be careful to consider the agency of the developer, as well as what information is presented to developers alongside fixes. It also indicates that there are key barriers related to trust that would need to be overcome for full scale APR adoption, supported by the fact that even those developers who stated that they were positive about APR listed several caveats and concerns. We find very few statistically significant relationships between particular demographic variables (for example, developer experience, age, education) and key attitudinal variables, suggesting that developers' instinctive attitudes towards APR are little influenced by experience level but are held widely across the developer community.

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Towards a Better Understanding of Testing if Conditionals

Nath

Merkel

Lau

et al. 2012

2012 19th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference

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Abstract-Fault based testing is a technique in which test cases are chosen to reveal certain classes of faults. At present, testing professionals use their personal experience to select testing methods for fault classes considered the most likely to be present. However, there is little empirical evidence available in the open literature to support these intuitions. By examining the source code changes when faults were fixed in seven open source software artifacts, we have classified bug fix patterns into fault classes, and recorded the relative frequencies of the identified fault classes. This paper reports our findings related to "if-conditional" fixes. We have classified the "if-conditional" fixes into fourteen fault classes and calculated their frequencies. We found the most common fault class related to changes within a single "atom". The next most common fault was the omission of an "atom". We analysed these results in the context of Boolean specification testing.

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On the improvement of a fault classification scheme with implications for white-box testing

Cited by 4 publications

References 13 publications

Automatically Extracting Instances of Code Change Patterns with AST Analysis

Automatically Extracting Instances of Code Change Patterns with AST Analysis

How do Developers Really Feel About Bug Fixing? Directions for Automatic Program Repair

Towards a Better Understanding of Testing if Conditionals

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