A machine learning approach for statistical software testing

  • Authors:
  • Nicolas Baskiotis;Michèle Sebag;Marie-Claude Gaudel;Sandrine Gouraud

  • Affiliations:
  • LRI, Université de Paris-Sud, CNRS, Orsay Cedex, France;LRI, Université de Paris-Sud, CNRS, Orsay Cedex, France;LRI, Université de Paris-Sud, CNRS, Orsay Cedex, France;LRI, Université de Paris-Sud, CNRS, Orsay Cedex, France

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'07 Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference on Artifical intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Some Statistical Software Testing approaches rely on sampling the feasible paths in the control flow graph of the program; the difficulty comes from the tiny ratio of feasible paths. This paper presents an adaptive sampling mechanismcalled EXIST for Exploration/ eXploitation Inference for Software Testing, able to retrieve distinct feasible paths with high probability. EXIST proceeds by alternatively exploiting and updating a distribution on the set of program paths. An original representation of paths, accommodating long-range dependencies and data sparsity and based on extended Parikh maps, is proposed. Experimental validation on real-world and artificial problems demonstrates dramatic improvements compared to the state of the art.