Hennessey, Mark and Power, James F.
(2008)
Analysing the effectiveness of rule-coverage as a reduction criterion for test suites of grammar-based software.
Empirical Software Engineering, 13 (4).
pp. 343-368.
ISSN 1382-3256
Abstract
The term
grammar-based software
describes software whose input can
be specified by a context-free grammar. This grammar may occur explicitly in the
software, in the form of an input specification to a parser generator, or implicitly,
in the form of a hand-written parser. Grammar-based software includes not only
programming language compilers, but also tools for program analysis, reverse en-
gineering, software metrics and documentation generation. Hence, ensuring their
completeness and correctness is a vital prerequisite for their use. In this paper we
propose a strategy for the construction of test suites for grammar based software, and
illustrate this strategy using the ISO C++
grammar. We use the concept of grammar-
rule coverage as a pivot for the reduction of an implementation-based test suite, and
demonstrate a significant decrease in the size of this suite. The effectiveness of this
reduced test suite is compared to the original test suite with respect to code coverage
and more importantly, fault detection. This work greatly expands upon previous
work in this area and utilises large scale mutation testing to compare the effectiveness
of grammar-rule coverage to that of statement coverage as a reduction criterion
for test suites of grammar-based software. This work finds that when grammar rule
coverage is used as the sole criterion for reducing test suites of grammar based
software, the fault detection capability of that reduced test suite is greatly diminished
when compared to other coverage criteria such as statement coverage
Repository Staff Only(login required)
 |
Item control page |
Downloads per month over past year
Altmetric
Altmetric