Pedro Delgado-Pérez

Universidad de Cádiz | UCA · Department of Computer Engineering

Context: Mutation testing has been mainly analyzed regarding traditional mutation operators involving structured programming constructs common in mainstream languages, but mutations at the class level have not been assessed to the same extent. This fact is noteworthy in the case of C++ , despite being one of the most relevant languages including ob...

Smart contracts (SC) are programs embodying certain business logic stored on a blockchain network like Ethereum. The execution of transactions on SC has a cost, measured in gas units, that depends on the low‐level operations performed. Therefore, a poor choice of high‐level language constructs could lead to overcharging users for their transactions...

Previous chapters have covered diverse software engineering areas, describing how a considerable number of activities throughout the software life cycle can benefit from optimisation and machine learning approaches to automate costly and laborious tasks. Within the content of those chapters, several search-based techniques are roughly explained or...

Mutation testing exploits artificial faults to measure the adequacy of test suites and guide their improvement. It has become an extremely popular testing technique as evidenced by the vast literature, numerous tools, and research events on the topic. Previous survey papers have successfully compiled the state of research, its evolution, problems,...

Software testing is a complex and costly stage during the software development lifecycle. Nowadays, there is a wide variety of solutions to reduce testing costs and improve test quality. Focussing on test case generation, Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) is used to generate tests with good structural coverage. Regarding test suite evaluation, Mutat...

Mutation testing is a well-established but costly technique to assess and improve the fault detection ability of test suites. This technique consists of introducing subtle changes in the code of a program, which are expected to be detected by the designed test cases. Among the strategies conceived to reduce its cost, evolutionary mutation testing (...

Automated test case generation has proven to be useful to reduce the usually high expenses of software testing. However, several studies have also noted the skepticism of testers regarding the comprehension of generated test suites when compared to manually designed ones. This fact suggests that involving testers in the test generation process coul...

La Industria 4.0 ha transformado todos los aspectos de la producción: desde el desarrollo de los procesos hasta las interacciones personales. Dentro del proceso de control de calidad de proyectos, la prueba del software busca que los sistemas funcionen sin fallos y conforme a lo esperado. Normalmente, esta es una etapa compleja dentro de la industr...

The correction of exercises in programming courses is a laborious task that has traditionally been performed in a manual way. This situation, in turn, delays the access by students to feedback that can contribute significantly to their training as future professionals. Over the years, several approaches have been proposed to automate the assessment...

The detection of performance bugs, like those causing an unexpected execution time, has gained much attention in the last years due to their potential impact in safety-critical and resourceconstrained applications. Much effort has been put on trying to understand the nature of performance bugs in different domains as a starting point for the develo...

Since its appearance in 2001, search-based software engineering has allowed software engineers to use optimisation techniques to automate distinctive human problems related to software management and development. The scientific community in Spain has not been alien to these advances. Their contributions cover both the optimisation of software engin...

Context: Mutation testing is considered to be a powerful approach to assess and improve the quality of test suites. However, this technique is expensive mainly because some mutants are semantically equivalent to the original program; in general, equivalent mutants require manual revision to differentiate them from useful ones, which is known as the...

Performance bugs are known to be a major threat to the success of software products. Performance tests aim to detect performance bugs by executing the program through test cases and checking whether it exhibits a noticeable performance degradation. The principles of mutation testing, a well-established testing technique for the assessment of test s...

Industry 4.0 is changing every perspective of production. This new industry requires the evolution of every aspect of the systems faster than ever before. In this situation, validation and verification emerge as a significant phase of the life cycle of software projects. A software failure could result in catastrophic consequences, so it is crucial...

The choice of mutation operators is a fundamental aspect in mutation testing to guide the tester to an effective test suite. Designing a set of mutation operators is subject to a trade-off between effectiveness and computational cost: a larger mutation population might uncover more faults, but will take longer to analyse. With the aim of resolving...

Trivial Compiler Equivalence (TCE) has been recently proposed as an effective technique to detect equivalences between programs, where two or more programs are equivalent if the compiler produces the same binary code. Mutation testing can greatly benefit from TCE as a way to reveal some equivalent and duplicate mutants, which traditionally hinder t...

Mutation testing is a suitable technique to determine the quality of test suites designed for a certain program. The set of mutation operators and the overall technique should be developed around each programming language in particular. The structures related to the object-oriented paradigm require a tailored analysis addressing them. However, clas...

For software quality assurance, many safety-critical industries appeal to the use of dynamic testing and structural coverage criteria. However, there are reasons to doubt the adequacy of such practices. Mutation testing has been suggested as an alternative or complementary approach but its cost has traditionally hindered its adoption by industry, a...

Performance bugs are common and can cause a significant deterioration in the behaviour of a program, leading to costly issues. To detect them and reduce their impact, performance tests are typically applied. However, there is a lack of mechanisms to evaluate the quality of performance tests, causing many of these bugs remain unrevealed. Mutation te...

Context: Search-based techniques have been applied to almost all areas in software engineering, especially to software testing, seeking to solve hard optimization problems. However, the problem of selecting mutants to improve the test suite at a lower cost has not been explored to the same extent as other problems, such as mutant selection for test...

Performance bugs are common, costly, and elusive. Performance tests aim to detect performance bugs by running the program with specific inputs and determining whether the observed behaviour is acceptable. There not exist mechanisms, however, to assess the effectiveness of performance tests. Mutation testing is a technique to evaluate and enhance fu...

This edited volume is composed of fifteen chapters and covers topics such as educational robotics, mobile applications in the classroom, teaching-learning methodologies and virtual environments, ecology, education in values and emotional intelligence.

The work on mutation testing has attracted a lot of attention during the last decades. Mutation testing is a powerful mechanism to improve the quality of test suites based on the injection of syntactic changes into the code of the original program. Several studies have focused on reducing the high computational cost of applying this technique and i...

The reduction of the expenses of mutation testing should be based on well-studied cost reduction techniques to avoid biased results. Evolutionary Mutation Testing (EMT) aims at generating a reduced set of mutants by means of an evolutionary algorithm, which searches for potentially equivalent and difficult to kill mutants to help improve the test s...

Mutation testing is an effective but costly testing technique. Several studies have observed that some mutants can be redundant and therefore removed without affecting its effectiveness. Similarly, some mutants may be more effective than others in guiding the tester on the creation of high-quality test cases. On the basis of these findings, we pres...

Mutation testing is a fault injection testing technique around which a great variety of studies and tools for different programming languages have been developed. Nevertheless, the mutation testing research with respect to C++ is pending. This paper proposes a set of class mutation operators related to this language and its particular object-orient...