Cross-Checking Oracles from Intrinsic Software Redundancy
- ICSE 2014
by
Antonio Carzaniga, Alberto Goffi, Alessandra Gorla, Andrea Mattavelli, Mauro Pezze'
ICSE '14: Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Software Engineering, Pages 346-357, ACM Press, June 2014.
ISBN: 978-1-4503-2756-5
Abstract
Despite the recent advances in automatic test generation, testers must still write test oracles manually. If formal specifications are available, it might be possible to use decision procedures derived from those specifications. We present a technique that is based on a form of specification but also leverages more information from the system under test. We assume that the system under test is somewhat redundant, in the sense that some operations are designed to behave like others but their executions are different. Our experience in this and previous work indicates that this redundancy exists and is easily documented. We then generate oracles by cross-checking the execution of a test with the same test in which we replace some operations with redundant ones. We develop this notion of cross-checking oracles into a generic technique to automatically insert oracles into unit tests. An experimental evaluation shows that cross-checking oracles, used in combination with automatic test generation techniques, can be very effective in revealing faults, and that they can even improve good hand-written test suites.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{gorla-crosscheckicse-2014,
title = "Cross-Checking Oracles from Intrinsic Software Redundancy",
author = "Antonio Carzaniga and Alberto Goffi and Alessandra Gorla and Andrea Mattavelli and Mauro Pezze'",
year = "2014",
month = jun,
booktitle = "ICSE '14: Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Software Engineering",
location = "Hyderabad, India",
pages = "346--357",
publisher = "ACM Press",
ISBN = "978-1-4503-2756-5",
}