Automatic generation of oracles for exceptional behaviors

Download: PDF, slides (PDF), Toradocu implementation.

“Automatic generation of oracles for exceptional behaviors” by Alberto Goffi, Alessandra Gorla, Michael D. Ernst, and Mauro Pezzè. In ISSTA 2016, Proceedings of the 2016 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, (Saarbrücken, Genmany), July 2016, pp. 213-224.

Abstract

Test suites should test exceptional behavior to detect faults in error-handling code. However, manually-written test suites tend to neglect exceptional behavior. Automatically-generated test suites, on the other hand, lack test oracles that verify whether runtime exceptions are the expected behavior of the code under test.

This paper proposes a technique that automatically creates test oracles for exceptional behaviors from Javadoc comments. The technique uses a combination of natural language processing and run-time instrumentation. Our implementation, Toradocu, can be combined with a test input generation tool. Our experimental evaluation shows that Toradocu improves the fault-finding effectiveness of EvoSuite and Randoop test suites by 8% and 16% respectively, and reduces EvoSuite's false positives by 33%.

Download: PDF, slides (PDF), Toradocu implementation.

BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{GoffiGEP2016,
   author = {Alberto Goffi and Alessandra Gorla and Michael D. Ernst and
	Mauro Pezz{\`e}},
   title = {Automatic generation of oracles for exceptional behaviors},
   booktitle = {ISSTA 2016, Proceedings of the 2016 International
	Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis},
   pages = {213--224},
   address = {Saarbr{\"u}cken, Genmany},
   month = jul,
   year = {2016}
}

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