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First, Debug the Test Oracle

delete2015-10-01
delete7
PRE
AI
X
Xinrui Guo *
周旻 (Min Zhou)
X
Xiaoyu Song
M
M. F. Gu
J
Jiaguang Sun
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2015.2425392delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Opposing to the oracle assumption, a trustworthy test oracle is not always available in real practice. Since manually written oracles and human judgements are still widely used, testers and programmers are in fact facing a high risk of erroneous test oracles. However, test oracle errors can bring much confusion thus causing extra time consumption in the debugging process. As substantiated by our experiment on the Siemens Test Suite, automatic fault localization algorithms suffer severely from erroneous test oracles, which impede them from reducing debugging time to the full extent. This paper proposes a simple but effective approach to debug the test oracle. Based on the observation that test cases covering similar lines of code usually generate similar results, we are able to identify suspicious test cases that are differently judged by the test oracle from their neighbors. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, experiments are conducted on both the Siemens Test Suite and grep. The results show that averagely over 75 percent of the highlighted test cases are actually test oracle errors. Moreover, performance of fault localization algorithms recovered remarkably with the debugged oracles.
Keywords:
Test oracle
debugging
spectrum-based fault localization
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Journal

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering cover
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
IF:
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tsinghua university
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Portland State University
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