Browsing by Author "NGUYEN, Anh Cuong"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    COPPICE: Discovering Complete API Rules through Mutation Testing
    (2012-03-27T09:01:47Z) NGUYEN, Anh Cuong; KHOO, Siau-Cheng
    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.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Extracting Significant Specifications from Mining through Mutation Testing (Technical Report)
    (2011-07-12T01:42:26Z) NGUYEN, Anh Cuong; KHOO, Siau-Cheng
    Specification mining techniques are used to automatically infer interaction specifications among objects in the format of call sequences, but many of these specifications can be meaningless or insignificant. As a consequence, when used in program testing or formal verification, the presence of these leads to false positive defects, which in turn demand much effort for manual investigation. We propose a novel process for determining and extracting significant specifications from a set of mined specifications using mutation testing. The resulting specifications can then be used with program verification to detect defects with high accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first fully automatic approach for extracting significant specifications from mining using program testing. We evaluate our approach through mining significant specifications for the Java API and use them to find real defects in many systems.