Reachability testing is an important approach to testing concurrent programs. It generates and exercises syn- chronization sequences automatically and on-the-fly without saving any test history. Existing reach, abilit...Reachability testing is an important approach to testing concurrent programs. It generates and exercises syn- chronization sequences automatically and on-the-fly without saving any test history. Existing reach, ability testing can be classified into exhaustive and t-way testing. Exhaustive testing is impractical in many cases whilie t-way testing may decrease the capability of fault detection in some cases. In this paper, we present a variable strengda reachability testing strategy, which adopts the dynamic framework of reachability testing and uses a variable strength combinatorial strategy. Different parameter groups are provided with different covering strength. Variable strength testing covers no t-way combinations but the necessary combinations of parameters having mutual interactions in a concurrent program. It is more reasonable than t-way testing because uniform interactions between parameters do not often exist in concurrent systems. We propose a merging algorithm that implements the variable strength combinatorial testing strategy and conduct our experiment on several concurrent programs. The experimental results indicate that our variable strength reachability testing reaches a good tradeoff between the effectiveness and efficiency. It can keep the same capability of fault detection as exhaustive reachability testing while substantially reducing the number of synchronization sequences and decreasing the execution time in most cases.展开更多
Much research has been done mainly in testcase generation and its effect for com-binatorial design approach for testing. This letter presents an algorithm for fault diagnosis basedon the approach. It can conclude that...Much research has been done mainly in testcase generation and its effect for com-binatorial design approach for testing. This letter presents an algorithm for fault diagnosis basedon the approach. It can conclude that the factors, which cause errors, must be in a very smallrange through analyzing the test cases after testing, and retesting with some complementary testcases. The algorithm can provide a very efficient and valuable guidance for the debugging andtesting of software.展开更多
Testing complex software systems is an extraordinarily difficult task.Test engineers are faced with the challenging prospect of ensuring that a software system satisfies its requirements while working within a strict ...Testing complex software systems is an extraordinarily difficult task.Test engineers are faced with the challenging prospect of ensuring that a software system satisfies its requirements while working within a strict budget.Choosing a test suite for such an endeavour can be framed as a design of experiments problem.Combinatorial testing is a software testing methodology that may be viewed as a design of experiments approach to addressing the software testing challenge.We extend this methodology by introducing the concept of blocking factors for a test suite.We provide an example,using an open source software library,to illustrate our extension.Advantages of considering blocks are discussed,both in the design as well as after test execution,when fault localisation may be necessary.展开更多
Testing is an integral part of software development.Current fastpaced system developments have rendered traditional testing techniques obsolete.Therefore,automated testing techniques are needed to adapt to such system...Testing is an integral part of software development.Current fastpaced system developments have rendered traditional testing techniques obsolete.Therefore,automated testing techniques are needed to adapt to such system developments speed.Model-based testing(MBT)is a technique that uses system models to generate and execute test cases automatically.It was identified that the test data generation(TDG)in many existing model-based test case generation(MB-TCG)approaches were still manual.An automatic and effective TDG can further reduce testing cost while detecting more faults.This study proposes an automated TDG approach in MB-TCG using the extended finite state machine model(EFSM).The proposed approach integrates MBT with combinatorial testing.The information available in an EFSM model and the boundary value analysis strategy are used to automate the domain input classifications which were done manually by the existing approach.The results showed that the proposed approach was able to detect 6.62 percent more faults than the conventionalMB-TCG but at the same time generated 43 more tests.The proposed approach effectively detects faults,but a further treatment to the generated tests such as test case prioritization should be done to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of testing.展开更多
Sugar aminotransferases(SATs)catalyze the installation of chiral amines onto specific keto sugars,pro-ducing bioactive amino sugars.Their activity has been utilized in artificial reactions,such as using the SAT WecE t...Sugar aminotransferases(SATs)catalyze the installation of chiral amines onto specific keto sugars,pro-ducing bioactive amino sugars.Their activity has been utilized in artificial reactions,such as using the SAT WecE to transform valienone into the valuable a-glucosidase inhibitor valienamine.However,the low thermostability and limited activity on non-natural substrates have hindered their applications.Simultaneously improving stability and enzyme activity is particularly challenging owing to the acknowledged inherent trade-off between stability and activity.A customized combinatorial active-site saturation test-iterative saturation mutagenesis(CAST-ISM)strategy was used to simultaneously enhance the stability and activity of WecE toward valienone.Fourteen hotspots related to improving the stability-\activity trade-off were identified based on evolutionary conservation and the average mutation folding energy assessment of 57 residues in the active site of WecE.Positive mutagenesis and combinatorial mutations of these specific residues were accomplished via site-directed saturation mutagenesis(SSM)and iterative evolution cycles.Compared with those of the wild-type(WT)WecE,the quadruple mutant M4(Y321F/K209F/V318R/F319V)displayed a 641.49-fold increase in half-life(t_(1/2))at 40℃ and a 31.37-fold increase in activity toward the non-natural substrate valienone.The tri-ple mutant M3(Y321F/K209F/V318R)demonstrated an 83.04-fold increase in(t_(1/2))at 40℃and a 37.77-fold increase in activity toward valienone.The underlying mechanism was dependent on the strengthened interface interactions and shortened transamination reaction catalytic distance,compared with those of the WT,which improved the stability and activity of the obtained mutants.Thus,we accomplished a general target-oriented strategy for obtaining stable and highly active SATs for artificial amino-sugar biosynthesis applications.展开更多
Recently, testing techniques based on dynamic exploration, which try to automatically exercise every possible user interface element, have been extensively used to facilitate fully testing web applications. Most of su...Recently, testing techniques based on dynamic exploration, which try to automatically exercise every possible user interface element, have been extensively used to facilitate fully testing web applications. Most of such testing tools are however not effective in reaching dynamic pages induced by form interactions due to their emphasis on handling client-side scripting. In this paper, we present a combinatorial strategy to achieve a full form test and build an automated test model. We propose an algorithm called pairwise testing with constraints （PTC） to iraplement the strategy. Our PTC algorithm uses pairwise coverage and handles the issues of semantic constraints and illegal values. We have implemented a prototype tool ComjaxTest and conducted an empirical study on five web applications. Experimental results indicate that our PTC algorithm generates less form test cases while achieving a higher coverage of dynamic pages than the general pairwise testing algorithm. Additionally, our ComjaxTest generates a relatively complete test model and then detects more faults in a reasonable amount of time, as compared with other existing tools based on dynamic exploration.展开更多
To generate test vector sets that can efficiently activate hardware Trojans and improve probability of the hardware Trojan activation,an efficient hardware Trojan activation method is proposed based on greedy algorith...To generate test vector sets that can efficiently activate hardware Trojans and improve probability of the hardware Trojan activation,an efficient hardware Trojan activation method is proposed based on greedy algorithm for combinatorial hardware Trojans. Based on the greedy algorithm and the recursive construction method in the combination test,the method formulates appropriate and useful greedy strategy and generates test vector sets with different combinatorial correlation coefficients to activate hardware Trojans in target circuits. The experiment was carried out based on advanced encryption standard（ AES） hardware encryption circuit,different combinatorial hardware Trojans were implanted in AES as target circuits,the experiment of detecting hardware Trojans in target circuits was performed by applying the proposed method and different combinatorial hardware Trojans in target circuits were activated successfully many times in the experiment. The experimental results showthat the test vector sets generated using the proposed method could effectively activate combinatorial hardware Trojans,improve the probability of the hardware Trojan being activated,and also be applied to practice.展开更多
The In-Parameter-Order （IPO） algorithm is a widely used strategy for the construction of software test suites for combinatorial testing （CT） whose goal is to reveal faults triggered by interactions among parameter...The In-Parameter-Order （IPO） algorithm is a widely used strategy for the construction of software test suites for combinatorial testing （CT） whose goal is to reveal faults triggered by interactions among parameters. Variants of IPO have been shown to produce test suites within reasonable amounts of time that are often not much larger than the smallest test suites known. When an entire test suite is executed, all faults that arise from t-way interactions for some fixed t are surely found. However, when tests are executed one at a time, it is desirable to detect a fault as early as possible so that it can be repaired. The basic IPO strategies of horizontal and vertical growth address test suite size, but not the early detection of faults. In this paper, the growth strategies in IPO are modified to attempt to evenly distribute the values of each parameter across the tests. Together with a reordering strategy that we add, this modification to IPO improves the rate of fault detection dramatically （improved by 31% on average）. Moreover, our modifications always reduce generation time （2 times faster on average） and in some eases also reduce test suite size.展开更多
文摘Reachability testing is an important approach to testing concurrent programs. It generates and exercises syn- chronization sequences automatically and on-the-fly without saving any test history. Existing reach, ability testing can be classified into exhaustive and t-way testing. Exhaustive testing is impractical in many cases whilie t-way testing may decrease the capability of fault detection in some cases. In this paper, we present a variable strengda reachability testing strategy, which adopts the dynamic framework of reachability testing and uses a variable strength combinatorial strategy. Different parameter groups are provided with different covering strength. Variable strength testing covers no t-way combinations but the necessary combinations of parameters having mutual interactions in a concurrent program. It is more reasonable than t-way testing because uniform interactions between parameters do not often exist in concurrent systems. We propose a merging algorithm that implements the variable strength combinatorial testing strategy and conduct our experiment on several concurrent programs. The experimental results indicate that our variable strength reachability testing reaches a good tradeoff between the effectiveness and efficiency. It can keep the same capability of fault detection as exhaustive reachability testing while substantially reducing the number of synchronization sequences and decreasing the execution time in most cases.
基金Supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(60073012),Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province.China(BK2001004),Opening Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering In Wuhan University,Opening Foundation of J
文摘Much research has been done mainly in testcase generation and its effect for com-binatorial design approach for testing. This letter presents an algorithm for fault diagnosis basedon the approach. It can conclude that the factors, which cause errors, must be in a very smallrange through analyzing the test cases after testing, and retesting with some complementary testcases. The algorithm can provide a very efficient and valuable guidance for the debugging andtesting of software.
文摘Testing complex software systems is an extraordinarily difficult task.Test engineers are faced with the challenging prospect of ensuring that a software system satisfies its requirements while working within a strict budget.Choosing a test suite for such an endeavour can be framed as a design of experiments problem.Combinatorial testing is a software testing methodology that may be viewed as a design of experiments approach to addressing the software testing challenge.We extend this methodology by introducing the concept of blocking factors for a test suite.We provide an example,using an open source software library,to illustrate our extension.Advantages of considering blocks are discussed,both in the design as well as after test execution,when fault localisation may be necessary.
基金The research was funded by Universiti Teknologi Malaysia(UTM)and the MalaysianMinistry of Higher Education(MOHE)under the Industry-International Incentive Grant Scheme(IIIGS)(Vote Number:Q.J130000.3651.02M67 and Q.J130000.3051.01M86)the Aca-demic Fellowship Scheme(SLAM).
文摘Testing is an integral part of software development.Current fastpaced system developments have rendered traditional testing techniques obsolete.Therefore,automated testing techniques are needed to adapt to such system developments speed.Model-based testing(MBT)is a technique that uses system models to generate and execute test cases automatically.It was identified that the test data generation(TDG)in many existing model-based test case generation(MB-TCG)approaches were still manual.An automatic and effective TDG can further reduce testing cost while detecting more faults.This study proposes an automated TDG approach in MB-TCG using the extended finite state machine model(EFSM).The proposed approach integrates MBT with combinatorial testing.The information available in an EFSM model and the boundary value analysis strategy are used to automate the domain input classifications which were done manually by the existing approach.The results showed that the proposed approach was able to detect 6.62 percent more faults than the conventionalMB-TCG but at the same time generated 43 more tests.The proposed approach effectively detects faults,but a further treatment to the generated tests such as test case prioritization should be done to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of testing.
基金supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China(2018YFE0200501 and 2020YFA0907700)the National Natural Science Foundation of China(32271306 and 21977067).
文摘Sugar aminotransferases(SATs)catalyze the installation of chiral amines onto specific keto sugars,pro-ducing bioactive amino sugars.Their activity has been utilized in artificial reactions,such as using the SAT WecE to transform valienone into the valuable a-glucosidase inhibitor valienamine.However,the low thermostability and limited activity on non-natural substrates have hindered their applications.Simultaneously improving stability and enzyme activity is particularly challenging owing to the acknowledged inherent trade-off between stability and activity.A customized combinatorial active-site saturation test-iterative saturation mutagenesis(CAST-ISM)strategy was used to simultaneously enhance the stability and activity of WecE toward valienone.Fourteen hotspots related to improving the stability-\activity trade-off were identified based on evolutionary conservation and the average mutation folding energy assessment of 57 residues in the active site of WecE.Positive mutagenesis and combinatorial mutations of these specific residues were accomplished via site-directed saturation mutagenesis(SSM)and iterative evolution cycles.Compared with those of the wild-type(WT)WecE,the quadruple mutant M4(Y321F/K209F/V318R/F319V)displayed a 641.49-fold increase in half-life(t_(1/2))at 40℃ and a 31.37-fold increase in activity toward the non-natural substrate valienone.The tri-ple mutant M3(Y321F/K209F/V318R)demonstrated an 83.04-fold increase in(t_(1/2))at 40℃and a 37.77-fold increase in activity toward valienone.The underlying mechanism was dependent on the strengthened interface interactions and shortened transamination reaction catalytic distance,compared with those of the WT,which improved the stability and activity of the obtained mutants.Thus,we accomplished a general target-oriented strategy for obtaining stable and highly active SATs for artificial amino-sugar biosynthesis applications.
基金This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61472076, 61472077, and 61300054.
文摘Recently, testing techniques based on dynamic exploration, which try to automatically exercise every possible user interface element, have been extensively used to facilitate fully testing web applications. Most of such testing tools are however not effective in reaching dynamic pages induced by form interactions due to their emphasis on handling client-side scripting. In this paper, we present a combinatorial strategy to achieve a full form test and build an automated test model. We propose an algorithm called pairwise testing with constraints （PTC） to iraplement the strategy. Our PTC algorithm uses pairwise coverage and handles the issues of semantic constraints and illegal values. We have implemented a prototype tool ComjaxTest and conducted an empirical study on five web applications. Experimental results indicate that our PTC algorithm generates less form test cases while achieving a higher coverage of dynamic pages than the general pairwise testing algorithm. Additionally, our ComjaxTest generates a relatively complete test model and then detects more faults in a reasonable amount of time, as compared with other existing tools based on dynamic exploration.
文摘To generate test vector sets that can efficiently activate hardware Trojans and improve probability of the hardware Trojan activation,an efficient hardware Trojan activation method is proposed based on greedy algorithm for combinatorial hardware Trojans. Based on the greedy algorithm and the recursive construction method in the combination test,the method formulates appropriate and useful greedy strategy and generates test vector sets with different combinatorial correlation coefficients to activate hardware Trojans in target circuits. The experiment was carried out based on advanced encryption standard（ AES） hardware encryption circuit,different combinatorial hardware Trojans were implanted in AES as target circuits,the experiment of detecting hardware Trojans in target circuits was performed by applying the proposed method and different combinatorial hardware Trojans in target circuits were activated successfully many times in the experiment. The experimental results showthat the test vector sets generated using the proposed method could effectively activate combinatorial hardware Trojans,improve the probability of the hardware Trojan being activated,and also be applied to practice.
基金the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61300007 and 61305054, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant Nos. YWF-15-GJSYS-106 and YWF-14-JSJXY-007, and the Project of the State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment of China under Grant Nos. SKLSDE-2015ZX-09 and SKLSDE-2014ZX-06.
文摘The In-Parameter-Order （IPO） algorithm is a widely used strategy for the construction of software test suites for combinatorial testing （CT） whose goal is to reveal faults triggered by interactions among parameters. Variants of IPO have been shown to produce test suites within reasonable amounts of time that are often not much larger than the smallest test suites known. When an entire test suite is executed, all faults that arise from t-way interactions for some fixed t are surely found. However, when tests are executed one at a time, it is desirable to detect a fault as early as possible so that it can be repaired. The basic IPO strategies of horizontal and vertical growth address test suite size, but not the early detection of faults. In this paper, the growth strategies in IPO are modified to attempt to evenly distribute the values of each parameter across the tests. Together with a reordering strategy that we add, this modification to IPO improves the rate of fault detection dramatically （improved by 31% on average）. Moreover, our modifications always reduce generation time （2 times faster on average） and in some eases also reduce test suite size.
