Archive
Blog - technical-news - posts for December 2018
Dec 21 2018
Short circuiting method executions to assess test quality
Today, a Medium article by Benoit Baudry, Professor in Software Technology at KTH and STAMP project coordinator, shares interesting results about Descartes mutation testing tool. This software can automatically short-circuit covered methods and determine a list of pseudo-tested methods in Java projects. Experimenting Descartes over 21 open source Java projects, a total of 28K+ methods could be analyzed, with three main results:
- short circuiting the complete execution of methods provides valuable feedback to developers. The developers have clear goal to write a test: to make this method not pseudo-tested anymore. Developers are more comfortable reasoning at the granularity of a method than at the statement level (fine grained traditional mutation testing).
- short circuiting methods has revealed the presence of pseudo-tested methods in all the projects that we have analyzed, even the ones with very high code coverage. Development teams of all Java projects can benefit from this type of analysis to assess their test suites and improve them.
- interviews with developers reveal that some pseudo-tested methods actually reveal major weaknesses in the test suite. We have collected empirical evidence of test suites fixed after running a short-circuiting experiment.
- For more details, read Descartes article by Benoit Baudry on Medium
Dec 17 2018
The ElasTest testing platform targets large distributed systems
A recent Elastest white paper raises issues of concern such as System Under Test deployments, IoT testing services and root cause analysis. The H2020 Elastest project is a STAMP related project. We are currently exploring integration opportunities between our tools.
With four demonstrators covering different application domains such as 5G networks, web applications, WebRTC, and IoT, the ElasTest platform is designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the testing process, and ultimately to improve the quality of large software systems deployed in the Cloud. Testers and developers of large distributed systems will learn more about the Elastest platform architecture and benefits in the Elastest white paper.
Dec 07 2018
Commit Assistant: the Ubisoft bug detection bot
What if a development bot could help you detect software bugs automatically, then provide probable causes for each issue along with fixes suggestions? Identifying patterns in past bugs to better intercept new bugs might save significant debugging time and cost to software development teams.
At Ubisoft La Forge Research Lab in Montreal, Technical Architect Mathieu Nayrolles collaborates on such a learning bot with Concordia University expert Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Using the innovative CLEVER approach, they can detect commits that are likely to introduce bugs, with an average of 79.10% precision and a 65.61% recall.
CLEVER combines code metrics, clone detection techniques, and project dependency analysis to detect risky commits within and across projects. CLEVER operates at commit-time, before the commits reach the central code repository. Also, because it relies on code comparison, CLEVER does not only detect risky commits but also makes recommendations to developers on how to fix them.
You can find more details on the risky commit detector online:
- Mathieu Nayrolles and Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj ICSE/Mining Software Repositories 2018 article: "CLEVER: Combining Code Metrics with Clone Detection for Just-In-Time Fault Prevention and Resolution in Large Industrial Projects"
- Ubisoft Commit Assistant article and video