Defects4J: A Database of existing faults to enable controlled testing studies for Java programs

Download: PDF, Defects4J website.

“Defects4J: A Database of existing faults to enable controlled testing studies for Java programs” by René Just, Darioush Jalali, and Michael D. Ernst. In ISSTA 2014, Proceedings of the 2014 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, (San Jose, CA, USA), July 2014, pp. 437-440. Tool demo.

Abstract

Empirical studies in software testing research may not be comparable, reproducible, or characteristic of practice. One reason is that real bugs are too infrequently used in software testing research. Extracting and reproducing real bugs is challenging and as a result hand-seeded faults or mutants are commonly used as a substitute.

This paper presents Defects4J, a database and extensible framework providing real bugs to enable reproducible studies in software testing research. The initial version of Defects4J contains 357 real bugs from 5 real-world open source programs. Each real bug is accompanied by a comprehensive test suite that can expose (demonstrate) that bug. Defects4J is extensible and builds on top of each program's version control system. Once a program is configured in Defects4J, new bugs can be added to the database with little or no effort.

Defects4J features a framework to easily access faulty and fixed program versions and corresponding test suites. This framework also provides a high-level interface to common tasks in software testing research, making it easy to conduct and reproduce empirical studies. Defects4J is publicly available at https://defects4j.org.

Download: PDF, Defects4J website.

BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{JustJE2014,
   author = {Ren{\'e} Just and Darioush Jalali and Michael D. Ernst},
   title = {{Defects4J}: A {Database} of existing faults to enable
	controlled testing studies for {Java} programs},
   booktitle = {ISSTA 2014, Proceedings of the 2014 International
	Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis},
   pages = {437--440},
   address = {San Jose, CA, USA},
   month = jul,
   year = {2014},
   note = {Tool demo}
}

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